Did you notice anything different about Twitter yesterday? Well, maybe if you’re Ashton Kutcher or Justin Beiber you did. Thanks to a Twitter bug which allowed people to force users to follow them, all of Twitter’s follower functions were shut down yesterday. For a brief time, everyone had zero followers and zero people followed! Cats and dogs living together! Anarchy in the streets!
All this over a force follow bug. Basically, if you wanted someone to follow you, all you had to do was message them with “accept [username]” and boom, they followed you. Everyone from PopFi on down had to follow you and read your interesting Tweets about the silly thing your cat did, breaking news on the flooding in Nashville, or Romeo and Juliet.
Of course, that begs the question: why would you want to force someone to read your Tweets if they didn’t want to? Is it that important to get noticed by Oprah or Martha Stewart or Kevin Smith? The Twitterverse has already lost Miley Cyrus; if this kind of thing keeps happening it’s going to drive everyone famous off the service!
Image: MeiGuoGuan
Tags: Twitter, Twitter bug, Twitter glitch, Twitter bug wipes out followers, Twitter bug forced followers to accept, Twitter followers disabled after bug, force follow bug