Twitter recently announced the existence of a security vulnerability that poses a particular risk for anonymous and pseudonymous Twitter accounts.
On Friday, the popular social media platform published a blog statement describing the nature of the security vulnerability, which, if exploited, could let someone send contact information (phone numbers, email addresses) to Twitter’s systems, which would then “tell the person what Twitter account the submitted email addresses or phone number are associated with, if any.” Essentially, with this bug, if you had someone’s contact information, you could use it to figure out which accounts on Twitter were theirs.
And while Twitter says that this vulnerability has been fixed, the bug unfortunately hadn’t been fixed before someone took advantage of it.
According to Twitter’s blog statement, the bug was reported to Twitter in January 2022 and it “immediately investigated and fixed it.” But then, in July, it discovered via “a press report” that someone had already exploited the vulnerability and was now trying to sell the data they collected. Twitter then reviewed a sample of that data and was able to verify that someone had “taken advantage of the issue before it was addressed.”
While Twitter says that it will be contacting the owners of accounts that were affected by this bug and its subsequent breach, that pertains only to account owners that it can confirm were affected. In fact, the blog post announcement of this incident was published because Twitter says it’s not able to confirm all of the accounts that could have been affected and that it is also concerned about “pseudonymous accounts” being targeted by “state or other actors.” It is also worth noting that Twitter said that passwords were not exposed in this breach.
Twitter did offer some advice for those with pseudonymous accounts: Don’t add a publicly available email address or phone number to your Twitter account. And for all Twitter users: Use two-factor authentication for logging in.
You just opened X and started typing your thoughts. Imagine the jump scare when a hand suddenly pops up on your screen, pointing at the promote button. It doesn’t say a word and simply points. For a growing number of X users, this isn’t a made-up scenario but something they have been seeing since yesterday, and very few of them are amused.
Most of us have learned to tune out the usual in-app upsells, whether it’s a glowing upgrade banner or a pop-up about a premium plan. A floating hand hovering over your draft is much harder to ignore, and that’s probably the whole point.
Scroll through any app for five minutes, and you’ll find someone maxxing something. Their skin, their sleep, their protein intake, even their Friday night on the couch. That little suffix has been everywhere this year, and now it has a trophy to show for it. In a recent announcement, Dictionary.com named maxxing its 2026 Word of the Year.
What are people actually doing when they’re maxxing?
Instagram is testing a new format for long-form videos called Features. It allows select creators to upload horizontal videos running up to 90 minutes long. Instagram has already tested the new format with creators in Brazil, and now, it's expanding to tens of thousands of creators across the US.
How will Instagram's new Features format work?