A pretty serious bug hit Twitter recently that allowed users to “force” others to follow them. By typing “accept [username]” you could gain any follower you wanted. The bug apparently only worked on the web interface – not in any third-party apps – and may only have appeared to give you followers, meaning those people would show up on your list but would not receive streams like a real follower would. I say serious only because you could potentially achieve some very prominent followers, like, say, Barack Obama, through this little exploit.
Twitter is aware of the bug, but the fix is a little ugly in the meantime. It requires rolling back accounts that made use of the exploit to zero followers. That includes sites that were doing any kind of testing. Sites like TechCrunch.
The zero count is only temporary, but it was probably a bit of a shock for Twitter’s heaviest users.
