Social media giant Twitter on Thursday told all its users across the globe to change their passwords. While it was for security reasons, it turned out to be that they had an internal slip-up which resulted in the passwords being reveal to all the employees.
The social media platform said they unintentionally ‘unmasked’ the passwords of their users because of a software bug. However, they also reported that hackers did not get access to the passwords and all of the data was safe but told the users to change the passwords to avoid any data leak. The 280-character unique site also acts as a platform for news and usually encrypts all the passwords through a process called ‘hashing’ so that they are not visible to people even inside the company. With the bug, the passwords were written on an internal log before the hashing process was complete.
While the tech company said they were working on resolving the issue so that it does not happen in the future, they did not reveal how many passwords were exposed. They also did not state for how long the glitch made user data vulnerable to hackers.