Twitter System Flaw Causes Major Disruptions

After month's of not suffering a system flaw with Twitter, I was starting to think I was living in a make believe world. This morning I was sent crashing back down to reality with Twitter's setback. This morning's glitch meant follower and following lists were rolled back to zero. It also allowed users to force another user to follow them. I should have stayed late last night and forced Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian to follow me.The glitch happened int the early morning in New Zealand, so by the time we logged into our accounts, it would have been just another day on Twitter.People's profiles returned to normal by around 4am(NZ) this morning. During the blackout, feeds remained the same with updates from friends, but the horror of seeing the following and followers column showing up as zero set alarms ringing all over the twittersphere. This was especially worrying for business users as potential clients and customers may disappear forever.Here is an Example from @CnnTech:[Image Via: Cnn.com]The New York Times: Bits Blog reported that the issue was first revealed by a Turkish man who wanted to tell his friends on Twitter about a band called “Accept” that he enjoyed listening to. When the man typed “Accept pwns” into the update box on Twitter he noticed that a user by the name of @pwns was now following him on the site.On Twitter's Company blog they assured their users this problem was fixed saying:Update (6:30 PM PST): We’ve finished our cleanup of the spurious followings generated a result of this bug. If you are still seeing folks you are following who you didn’t choose to follow, please use the block or unfollow tools to remedy.What can Businesses do if this happens again ?

1. Don't panic!
2. Check your Twitter Feed to see if you still get updates  from people you are following (if your feed is as it should be there's nothing to worry about - Twitter is resolving the problem
3. In situations like this it's good to check other social  network platforms to announce your situation on Twitter, so  people know you care.
4. And If all Social Networks are down, for some reason, use that much ignored social media tool: your phone.
5. Always check the official blogs of these social networks for news, updates, changes and any faults they've encountered.

Here are the Official Social Network Main Blogs:Facebook: http://blog.facebook.com/Twitter: http://status.twitter.com/ and http://blog.twitter.com/Youtube: http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/