Twitter, the Bluth Company of Silicon Valley social networks, kicked off Tuesday by sending users incomprehensible text strings via push notifications. A wide range of Twitter users tweeted their notifications, which consisted of long strings of numbers and lowercase letters, followed by a colon and another number. Maybe it’s a random burst of data. Maybe Twitter has revealed the nuclear launch codes! Either way, it should be a fun afternoon.
Twitter spammed people’s phones with cryptic notifications
Someone who is good at cryptography, please tell us what these mean
Someone who is good at cryptography, please tell us what these mean
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
is the editor of the Platformer newsletter and cohost of the Hard Fork podcast.
Tapping on the notifications simply opens your notifications tab — and not, as you might have guessed from reading one, the company’s private Bitcoin address. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also received a bunch of the notifications and promised that Twitter is “on it.”
Minutes after tweeting that the company was “on it,” Dorsey reported that the issue “should be fixed now.” “Working to understand why it happened,” Dorsey added, which would make for a good name for his Twitter memoir some day.
Update, 2:20PM: Dorsey says the issue had something to do with “invisible background notifications” used to update badge counts.
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