Twitter: Don't panic, but we may have leaked your DMs to rando devs
Twitter is in full damage control mode after disclosing that it may have inappropriately exposed some unlucky twits' private tweets and direct messages to strangers.
The 280-character shoutfest admitted on Friday that a bug present in one of its APIs from May 2017 to September 10, 2018, could have caused some messages to leak to certain third-party programmers. The biz claimed less than one per cent of its users would be affected, but seeing as Twitter is used by roughly 340 million people a month, you do the math. (OK, perhaps as many as 3.4 million.)
According to Twitter, the coding blunder in its webhook system required a very specific set of circumstances to trigger. If it did flare up, a person's account activity would be routed to the wrong third-party application rather than apps connected to their account. Thus, copies of direct messages and protected tweet would end up in the hands of whoever built the application that incorrectly received that information.
