A popular Twitter app TweetDeck has been temporarily shuts down for several hours today following a major security alert.
Affected tweeters saw pop-up windows on their screens. The tweet was automatically “retweeted” or sent out again when processed by TweetDeck.
The vulnerability allowed attackers to place computer code in a tweet.
Twitter has acknowledged the problem and, in response, taken down TweetDeck services temporarily. “We’ll update when services are back up,” it said.
Twitter initially told TweetDeck users to log out and log back in.
Twitter has said a security fix and turned TweetDeck services back on for all of its users. “Sorry for any inconvenience,” it said in a tweet.
TweetDeck is a free download for desktop computers, iPhones, Google’s Android devices and the Google Chrome browser.
The software allows users to organize their Twitter streams and offers a more user friendly view of Twitter feeds.
Tweetdeck was originally a British company, and was acquired by Twitter for about £25m ($40m) in May 2011.
