Twitter Meltdown Explained

. . . if you noticed.

May 10, 2010 at 7:02PM
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
You have no friends
You have no friends (The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Earlier today 'CCO's morning weather guy Mike Augustyniak twittered:

I wrote back to tell him that if he'd typed the name of the volcano on a mobile device, I was really impressed. (Actually, most stuff I type on mobile devices looks like the name of an Iceland volcano.) But the DM didn't go: he wasn't following me. Since when? What had I done? Then I checked, and discovered I had ZERO followers. Not even the fake accounts I'd set up to make it look like I had more followers - er, not even my closest friends? Unpossible.

Turns out Twitter had a big, big technical FUBAR today, based on an exploit that allowed people to force others to follow them. That's right: for a brief second, Conan may have been following two people. More here; Twitter says it's fixed now.

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