All hell broke lose today when a fan of the 80s metal band Accept (sometimes considered the poor man’s AC/DC) tweeted "Accept pwnz". A bug in Twitter made user @pwnz his follower.
So the story goes, and the bug that let people steal followers was born.
Twitter posted to its status blog:
We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to "force" other users to follow them. We’re now working to rollback all abuse of the bug that took place. Follower/following numbers are currently at 0; we’re aware and this too should shortly be resolved.
Twitter later updated:
Of note: protected updates did not become public as a result of this bug.
Lots of abusers were quick to take advantage of the exploit. Mashable’s Adam Ostrow pointed out that Conan O’Brien, who famously only followed a single person, SynBay, had his follower count changed to 14 (it’s back to 1).
Still, it is somewhat refreshing to find out that such a bug was not discovered through any malicious intent, but just by someone who wanted to share his love for the creators of " Balls to the Wall ".