Did you get a bunch of strange notifications on your phone from Twitter yesterday? The pushed alerts were a string of letters and numbers followed by a colon and a number. What was it? Why did it happen? And what do you need to do? We have all the answers!
The notifications may have looked like this:
What’s happening to twitter? pic.twitter.com/WTFzpYCXPX
— Jane Bradley (@jane__bradley) October 16, 2018
Everyone was pretty confused, including Twitter CEO and cofounder Jack Dorsey:
We’re seeing this issue too. On it. pic.twitter.com/pzjd6248gJ
— jack (@jack) October 16, 2018
Shortly thereafter, he announced the flaw was fixed and explained what triggered it:
The why, from team: “We send an invisible background notification to the app with badge counts (mainly unread notifications, DMs, etc.). The issue caused these notifications to become visible for a short period of time. We don't know exactly why, but quickly reverted.”
— jack (@jack) October 16, 2018
While it’s still unclear why it happened, the error doesn’t seem malicious at this point. It’s important to always be #CyberAware because mistakes like this can happen and be much less obvious, often going undetected for weeks. Be sure to run regular FixMeStick scans to know your computer is clean!