Several Twitter users have received password reset request emails on Monday from the microblogging website, after being temporarily locked out of their accounts.
“Twitter believes that your account may have been compromised by a website or service not associated with Twitter,” read the reset notice from Twitter.
“We’ve reset your password to prevent accessing your account.”
Later, a Twitter spokesman revealed that the password reset request emails were due to a false alarm and not a security breach.
“We unintentionally sent some password reset notices tonight due to a system error,” said the spokesman to Re/code. “We apologize to the affected users for the inconvenience.”
Twitter confirmed the number of affected users to be far “less than one percent of the company’s base,” though that could mean up to a couple of million users accounts.
Twitter also added that affected users will be able to regain access after setting up a new password and advised the users to avoid using old passwords and choose a strong password with a combination of letters, numbers and symbols.
This is not the first instance of Twitter account passwords being reset. The microblogging site had reset passwords of a large number of users in November 2012. Twitter was hit by a major hacker attack and asked affected users to reset their password.
However, the service apologised for mistakenly resetting “the large number” of accounts “beyond those that it believed to have been compromised.”
Last year, Twitter revealed multiple access attempts by unauthorized individuals who were able to access usernames, email addresses and encrypted/salted passwords of approximately 250,000 users.
I am not a regular user of twitter and i think that is why i was spared…So not being regular sometimes helps…