Twitter temporarily hits the reset button on follower counts amid bugs

You know that precious follower count you’ve spent months building up by posting insightful tweets and conversations on Twitter?

It’s temporarily at zero this morning after a bug emerged that allowed anyone to force anyone else to follow them.

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All you had to do was tweet “accept” followed by the person’s Twitter handle with the “@” sign included, and they would immediately follow you. The company said it has fixed the bug and the zero follower and following counts should be back to normal soon.

The mix-up resulted in several pranks like this one from a ReadWriteWeb story entitled: “I Accepted @Jesus and Now He’s My Follower.”

Blogger Mike Melanson wrote:

“Have I mentioned how cool I am? This morning alone, Bill Gates, Conan O’Brien and Jesus all started following me on Twitter. Seriously.

Was it something I said? As a matter of fact, it was – “accept @jesus” was all it took to get onto the seriously short list of people Jesus pays attention to when he logs into Twitter. And the bug has people all over the Web scrambling to get the rich, famous and influential to follow their Twitter accounts.”