Tweetdeck, the app used as a Twitter client for posting tweets and messages on Twitter, which was acquired by Twitter in the previous year in May was apparently shut down yesterday when a source confirmed that a bug in the app allowed him to access hundreds of accounts on Twitter and Facebook.
The source happens to be a Syndey, Australia based user, Geoff Evason, who explained to Tech Crunch about the bug in the email as stated below:
“I’m a tweetdeck user. A bug has given me access to hundreds of twitter and facebooks account through tweetdeck. I didn’t do anything special to make this happen. I just logged in one day, the account was was slower than normal, and I could post from many more accounts.”
“I normally use the tweetdeck web client. A few days ago it started freezing when I logged in. Today I downloaded the native mac client, and it crashes too, but not before it shows me some streams and lets me post.”
He also tweeted an image as a proof of what he foretold, on Twitter and also gave a tweet through a different account as a test confirmation :
As soon as Twitter got a hold of this, they took Tweetdeck offline on the very same moment to assure minimal damage and tweeted about the same on twitter in the “Tweetdeck” account. Its now back online with official apology tweet from the Twitter account and the following statement :
As soon as we learned about the issue today, we took TweetDeck down to diagnose the situation. We discovered a bug that caused a very small number of TweetDeck users to have access to other TweetDeck users’ accounts. (The accounts that could be accessed were random; it was not possible to select specific accounts and access them).
No one’s password was compromised, and we aren’t aware of any instances where this access was used maliciously. As a precaution, we removed account credentials associated with affected TweetDeck users; they will need to log in to authorize the TweetDeck application to access their accounts.
So, if any of the users may still feel unsafe about their account information being compromised, feel free to change your account credentials.
