Crisis averted, Twitter follower counts quickly restored

Today’s riot act on Twitter, which saw users temporarily able to force other users to auto-follow them, has been brought to a swift end. Although Twitter’s powers-that-be inadvertently caused widespread panic by disabling follow/unfollow functionality to limit the damage and temporally zeroing out all follower counts in the process, order was quickly restored moments later when the original follower counts were reinstated – thus making the whole affair one of the briefer, if perhaps most eye popping, glitches in the service’s four year history. While it’s not clear whether the users who hacked their way into getting celebrity tweeters to follow them back have succeeded, a quick check of the accounts of some of Twitter’s most popular users confirms that they did indeed get all their millions of followers back. Some of them may, however, now need to spend some time removing some users from the list of people they’re following who aren’t supposed to be there.

For most users, however, the only obvious evidence at this point that the whole thing even happened lies with remaining trending topics such as “Twitter Bug Lets You” and “Following 0.”