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.
Is anyone else getting random Twitter notifications like this? pic.twitter.com/YbXmwibCBP
— Vex King (@VexKing) October 16, 2018
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.
We’re seeing this issue too. On it. pic.twitter.com/pzjd6248gJ
— jack (@jack) October 16, 2018
Twitter users, as they’re wont to do, reacted with a mix of jokes and fear.
https://twitter.com/420quirk/status/1052237109396992000
twitter fixing their servers after they send me 32 d99a3aea4d82473b83ce446e88579d5773c39: 1 notifications pic.twitter.com/zbBb2GCxiY
— Evan🕴 (@goofyneckass) October 16, 2018
twitter notifications: https://t.co/UCajTJZzpT
— Seth Everman (@SethEverman) October 16, 2018
what is happening with these notifications, twitter is broken again jsksks pic.twitter.com/Q92xsk39Ba
— sabi (@emptywalletscal) October 16, 2018
https://twitter.com/introjin/status/1052236818165379072
The issue apparently didn’t take long to be resolved. Dorsey tweeted, “Should be fixed now. Working to understand what happened.”
Should be fixed now. Working to understand why it happened
— jack (@jack) October 16, 2018
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.”
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.