Twitter bug forces anyone to follow you, but Twitter shuts it down quickly

For a brief period this afternoon, you could send out a simple tweet that would automatically make any Twitter user follow you. The bug was stupidly simple: you just had to tweet "accept @accountname," and you'd get an instant follow. It made the rounds of the blogs after being discovered by Neowin, but Twitter was able to put the kibosh on it a mere half-hour after it first came to our attention.

The fix seems to be involving a bit of a reset at Twitter. Your stream should be operating normally, but every account on the site now appears to have zero friends and zero followers. Twitter may be grabbing a backup of the database from before the bug happened, but there's no official word yet. Basically, there's nothing to worry about, and nobody is going to make you follow their Twitter account.

(Of course, that also means I can't make Conan O'Brien follow me. Bummer.)

Update: Twitter has an official blog post up, declaring the bug fixed.

Tags: accept, accept bug, AcceptBug, bug, exploit, followers, twitter