Calm down, those weird messages you got on Twitter were not a Russian hack or a data leak
Twitter Support has explained what was really going on
If you use Twitter on your iPhone, there’s a strong chance you received a strange and confusing notification yesterday.
Maybe you got more than one of these notifications – a string of numbers and letters corresponding to… well, nothing obvious. It just seemed entirely random, which in these modern times of hackers and data theft, was a little unnerving for many people.
With the apparent recent trend of data leaks and password breaches, a fair few people were worried the alerts were part of a carefully and widely orchestrated hack on Twitter users.
However, we’ve now been told it was nothing of the sort.
First off, if you’re confused about the nature of the alerts themselves, they looked a little like this:
If you didn’t get one, it’s likely for one of three reasons:
a) You use a non-Apple device
b) You have Twitter alerts turned off
c) You’re just not popular enough for anyone to have tweeted at you during the relevant time period (sorry).
It’s not, however, anything to do with a coordinated hacking attack. Still, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was not ruling anything out when the issues first hit – mostly because, at the time, even he wasn’t sure what was going on.
The issue was solved within minutes of Dorsey’s tweet, and Twitter’s ‘Support’ account would later provide an explanation.
“You know those red bubbles that appear when you get notifications? Usually, you wouldn’t see this in numbers and code, but that’s how we talk to your phone so you get those notifications. It’s fixed, we’re good,” the statement read.
So, if you were worried you’d given away a bunch of personal info simply by posting screenshots of those weird notifications or were being infiltrated by some kind of malicious code, you can rest easily.It’s all good. It was just the Twitter equivalent of blowing dust out of a SNES cartridge.
(Images: Pixabay)
