This morning I logged into my twitter account and noticed something strange. My Twitter follower count moved from over 5500 followers to zero instantaneously between reloads!  A Turkish man accidentally discovered a bug in Twitter after tweeting about his favorite band “Accept.” By issuing the tweet, “accept pwnz,” he was able to exploit a bug in the Twitter website which allowed the him to force other Twitter accounts to automatically follow him. Twitter discovered the bug after being alerted by the individual and temporarily reset every users follower count to zero while they worked on the issue.  Many Twitter users immediately tweeted about the issue and several celebrities chimed in on the issue:
Ashton Kutcher: twitter is being hacked by some turkish hacker. haha I have 0 followers.
Justin Bieber: so i woke up here in LA and Twitter has been hacked. Turns out I am no longer popular … hackers i send a warning…u have now pissed off over 2 million teenage girls. They are more dangerous than Navy Seals.
Jim Carrey: Imagine if this hacker put his/her talent 2 some worthy use. They could 1 day have more than a false sense of superiority. They’d #BOING ;^>
Alyssa Milano: Ummmmm….. Where did my followers go @Twitter?
Mark Indelicato: It says that I have 0 followers……
Stephen Collins (7th Heaven): According 2 Twitter they’ve fixed a bug/hack that re-set following/follower #s to 0. Scary. So far, my acct isn’t re-set. Holding breath.
Joe Jonas: Wait.. So this means I have to “talk†to my friends?
The bug was first discovered in a Turkish website, which I have attempted to translate (any of our Turkish viewers willing to submit a better translation?) with Google Translate:
I know that I do not think this bug. twiti accept that start with a code that identifies the code as written should be. twitter is too flat or system that is quite a simple system they write, next to facebook. entered with the data sent by the same function, they showed twiti. After all, if you want to send a data in a way and this is a bug if you send a code to be written against it, by entering a twit you’ve done the easy way ha, ha hard way. When the easy way to write the entire code is perceived as most likely. I would not do so even if I was, anyway.
hide profile sent to people who question the follower They’ll accept bids for your keywords, if you request a follow no action will be taken. so simple.
note: I’m speaking without knowing, I have no programming knowledge about the particles. I like to rant, swh.
The Twitter staff has acknowledged the bug and has already taken remediation steps to fix the error.
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14 comments
the Twitter bug and ensuing 0 followers/0 following fiasco was inadvertently started by a Turkish fan of heavy metal band Accept. When this young man tweeted “Accept pwnz,†he found that the user @pwnz was suddenly following him.
The fellow, who says he doesn’t have any Twitter-related programming knowledge, wrote a blog post about the accidental exploit. At least one commenter said he tried to contact Twitter employees about the bug but got no response.
Thank you for your contribution! I went ahead and updated the post.
So a guy accidentally finds a bug in twitter because he likes a band? And you guys call him a hacker? You guys should now better and not misuse it just to hype your article. Sad.
I went ahead and redacted some invalid statements and updated it to reflect the true situation. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
The hacker’s name is Bora Kirca, btw.
i just see im in tv he said that he find the hack te twitter when he go to the school lol ha
the people heard a music from a metal group and they say in the song accept pwnz and then he will twit this on twittter and he wrote accept pwnz and the he see that he have gave a command to twitter.
this is all
when you wrote “accept (a name)”
you get a error