Twitter Recommends All 330 Million Users Change Passwords
(CBSLA) — Twitter announced Thursday that it had accidentally stored passwords unprotected in its internal system, and encouraged all of its approximately 330 million users to consider changing theirs.
A post on Twitter's official blog attributed to CTO Parag Agrawal said the company had "identified a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log." Agrawal stressed that Twitter's investigation "shows no indication of breach or misuse by anyone," but encouraged users to stop using their current Twitter passwords on all services "out of an abundance of caution."
We are sharing this information to help people make an informed decision about their account security. We didn't have to, but believe it's the right thing to do. https://t.co/yVKOqnlITA
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) May 3, 2018
Twitter also encouraged users to enable two-factor authentication, also known as login verification, to ensure their accounts wouldn't be compromised, and to also considering using a password manager that automatically generates secure logins.
The company did not say how many users were affected by the mistake. Twitter's stock (TWTR) price dropped in after-hours trading.