Twitter Admits To Security Breach That Exposed Circle Tweets To Complete Strangers

Twitter accepts that a bug leaked privately shared tweets to public. The security incident which occurred on the Elon Musk-owned social platform in the recent weeks exposed the Circle tweets with everyone.

Twitter reached out to the affected users via email and apologized for the privacy breach. It also communicated with its users that the bug has now been fixed.

The commitment with which Twitter works for its user base is well known. The Californian based company also mentioned that it understands the depth of risks associated with the disruption of privacy among its users.

Twitter allows its users to communicate and maintain healthy relations with their known ones through direct contact and tweets. Circle tweets allows the users to share their feelings to select circle involving trusted friends, rather than the general public, just like the Close Friends List in Instagram.

The visibility of the tweets sent to the Circle changed to everyone, following the security issue in April 2023. Twitter Circle feature allowed only select audience to view and react to the tweets that were shared with them. However, the bug made the tweets visible to others outside the user circle, thus interrupting their privacy.

The main idea behind twitter circles, which was introduced in May 2022, did not allow even a particular user’s friends to see the conversations unless both share common members. Twitter permitted to make only one Circle, comprising of 150 people.

Yet, during the security breach, most of the users themselves noted that many of their tweets were getting likes and comments from people outside their circle and complete strangers.

While others reported that the tweets reached further than the people who follow them by showing up in the ‘For You’ timeline of individuals who were not included in the Circle.

On reporting these events to the micro blogging site, the autoreply went with a poo emoji, disregarding the concern the users had brought up. The reports of security breach went unattended because the press office had been de-staffed.

That is when the security team of the company took to action and fixed the bug immediately so that the circle tweets were no longer visible to the general public.

Twitter has noted many changes since last October when Elon Musk took over the firm.

The security breach occurred earlier this year, but the emails got delayed as the CEO decided to sack the Communications team.

Many of the operational engineers also were put down, which eventually caused multiple disruptions in the social media company and kicked off quite a few buggy features.

New components were also introduced without any proper strategy. It affected mainly the ‘For You’ tab that offers only personalized tweets to its users.

Twitter has also reported many vulnerabilities in its service. Even so, it is seen that the bug largely affects only about 1 per cent of its users.

Month after month of layoffs had been noticed with at least 60 per cent of its headcount shed since Elon Musk took the charge. Numerous evictions of workforce has been noted in London and Singapore over unpaid rent bills.

The cost-cutting techniques which the company has practiced brought further effect on its services over web hosting, and unpaid bills of janitor supplies and office space.

In countries like Germany, where legal requirements itself site an effective content moderation, have struck the company with massive fines of up to 50 million Euros.

Musk also had declared earlier that the site needed a complete rewire until which the services may seem unstable.

Twitter has now crossed a 17 year milestone after coming into being in 2006. Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Noah Glass and Evan Williams together laid the foundation for this microblogging website.

Timely action from the company’s end avoids any further miscommunications that could have taken place due to the security issues.

Proofread & Published By Naveenika Chauhan