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Twitter users were getting weird, nonsensical notifications today

The bug spooked users for a while.

Photo of Brittany Vincent

Brittany Vincent

Twitter graphic on phone

If you received a flood of bizarre Twitter notifications containing strings of weird numbers and letters on your phone earlier today, you’re not the only one. The good news? It looks like the bug has been fixed now.

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Twitter founder and CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted a screenshot Tuesday morning saying, “We’re seeing this issue too. On it.” The message came in response to various reports that users had seen jumbled-up mixtures of numbers and letters in their notifications from the social media platform.

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Twitter users, as they’re wont to do, reacted with a mix of jokes and fear.

https://twitter.com/420quirk/status/1052237109396992000

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https://twitter.com/introjin/status/1052236818165379072

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The issue apparently didn’t take long to be resolved. Dorsey tweeted, “Should be fixed now. Working to understand what happened.”

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Dorsey noted that according to the Twitter team that investigated, the issue was tied to Twitter’s “invisible background notification to the app with badge counts.”

The official Twitter Support account explained the phenomenon with its own post.

“You know those red bubbles that appear when you get notifications? Usually, you wouldn’t see this in numbers and code, but that’s how we talk to your phone so you get those notifications. It’s fixed, we’re good,” read the tweet.

In response, the official verified Twitter account remarked, “Well, that was weird.”

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https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1052261493566263297

If you were sitting around concerned all day that your phone was either haunted or trying to send you some sort of coded message, you can breathe easy. It looks like it’s all been handled, and we’ll be able to stave off bowing to our robotic overlords another day … for now.

 
The Daily Dot