Twitter admits some private Circle tweets were accidentally made public due to 'security incident'
Kacper Pempel/Reuters
- A "security incident" led to Twitter Circle tweets being viewable by the public.
- Weeks after users began reporting the issue, Twitter sent affected users an email acknowledging the privacy bungle.
- Twitter Circles are meant to be a personally curated private audience of users.
Weeks after the incident, Twitter finally acknowledged that tweets shared to some users' private Twitter Circle were made public due to a bug.
Impacted Twitter users received an email from the platform on Friday informing them of a "security incident" that caused their semi-private tweets to be seen by more than just close friends in their Twitter Circle.
"In April 2023, a security incident may have allowed users outside of your Twitter Circle to see tweets that should have otherwise been limited to the Circle to which you were posting," the email, which was obtained by Fortune, read.
It continued: "This issue was identified by our security team and immediately fixed so that these tweets were no longer visible outside of your Circle."
Twitter Circle is described as a private set of Twitter followers with whom users share tweets not intended for all followers — or the entire world — to see. Users create and curate their Twitter Circle list based on their own preferences.
However, in April, some began to report glitches with the feature. In a test tweet, one user confirmed that someone not in his Twitter Circle was able to see a tweet he'd sent out to his personal list of followers.
—Theo - t3.gg (@t3dotgg) April 8, 2023
One month after the user's experiment, those affected received an email from Twitter acknowledging the incident and assuring that the security team fixed the issue. It's unclear how many users were affected by the bug.
"Twitter is committed to protecting the privacy of the people who use our service, and we understand the risks that an incident like this can introduce and we deeply regret this happened," the company said in its email to users, per Fortune.