Twitter has advised all of its users – who total over 330 million – to change their passwords for the site immediately after a bug in its system.
The social media giant posted an update to its official blog revealing that some passwords may have been compromised, but that the company discovered and fixed the issue itself.
It explained that user passwords which are usually ‘hashed’ were temporarily stored in plain text, although it did not confirm exactly how many users were affected by the issue.
‘When you set a password for your Twitter account, we use technology that masks it so no one at the company can see it,’ reads the post.
‘We recently identified a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. We have fixed the bug, and our investigation shows no indication of breach or misuse by anyone.
‘Out of an abundance of caution, we ask that you consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password.’
‘All services’ would include other apps related to Twitter, such as Buffer and TweetDeck.
The blog also outlined exactly what had occurred, saying: ‘We mask passwords through a process called hashing using a function known as bcrypt, which replaces the actual password with a random set of numbers and letters that are stored in Twitter’s system.
‘This allows our systems to validate your account credentials without revealing your password. This is an industry standard.
‘Due to a bug, passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process. We found this error ourselves, removed the passwords, and are implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again.’
The company also said it is ‘very sorry this happened’ and promised it is ‘committed to earning… trust every day’.
The breach follows a major security issue at fellow social media site Facebook, which recently admitted that the data of 87 million users may have been improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
That company has just announced that it is shutting down in the wake of the scandal.
