CONFIRMED: Twitter Takeover Caused By Facebook Glitch

 By 
Ben Parr
 on 
CONFIRMED: Twitter Takeover Caused By Facebook Glitch

Facebook and Twitter users started reporting en-masse of a Twitter takeover of their Facebook walls several hours ago Essentially, anyone with the Twitter or Friendfeed app installed on Facebook saw their posts being automatically pushed to their Facebook feeds. We also believe that it affected Facebook Beacon settings.

Now we can confirm that it was a glitch on the part of Facebook, and that it is now fixed. We first got a hint that there was an issue with Facebook application settings from Bret Taylor, FriendFeed's co-founder (and creator of Gmail):

"We have received numerous reports of excessive FriendFeed posts showing up in Facebook this evening. While we are not 100% sure, it appears to be an issue on Facebook's end due to ignoring application settings. We have disabled all FriendFeed updates to Facebook until we are sure the problem is resolved."

However, final confirmation came in the form of a statement we received from the Facebook team:

"Earlier this evening, a small Facebook bug allowed a handful of apps to publish to the stream on behalf of users who had previously authorized the app. The situation has now been resolved, and all application settings will remain intact for users."

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