Twitter Bug Problems: Temporarily Bars Users From Site; Tweets Stamped With Old Dates

Twitter was recently hit by a bug that shut some users out of the site while others who were able to log in were surprised to find out that their current tweets were already 365 days old. The shutdown lasted for nearly five and a half hours and was eventually fixed by the company's tech team.

The bug on Twitter turned out to be the result of a faulty code which popped up on Dec. 29 at around 4 p.m. PT. As a result, users who were logged in on devices with the Android OS and Tweetdeck were automatically logged out and were prompted to log in again.

The Guardian reports that when some users who could not open their account tried to log in again they were greeted with the error message "Please try again later."

Others who were able to log in found out that their tweets were being incorrectly dated. On Tweetdeck especially, new tweets as they came in were time-stamped with a 365-day-old date.

Some users poked fun at this error. However, others expressed concern that Twitter could be a victim of a hacking attack and could be down for a long period of time.

One Twitter user with the handle @KingEbola claimed that he was responsible for the hack, even posting a screenshot on his account.

However, the Guardian said the screenshot appeared to be an old one as it was dated "2012." After fixing the bug, Twitter removed all the tweets from @KingEbola's account and left only one on it.

The outage was resolved at around 9:25 p.m. PT and people were able to tweet again with the correct time stamp. On the official Twitter page, a statement was then released stating that the outage was due to a "bug in the front end code."