Twitter notifies 'affected users' over privacy breach exposing 'Circle' messages

Twitter confirmed Saturday a privacy breach resulted in the public exposure of tweets originally meant for users' "Twitter Circle," — also known as "close friends," The Guardian reports.

Per The Guardian, the company sent an email to "affected users" revealing the "tweets had escaped this containment," writing, "A security incident that occurred earlier this year may have allowed users outside of your Twitter Circle to see tweets that should have otherwise been limited to the Circle to which you were posting."

Additionally, the corporation said the problem "was identified by our security team and immediately fixed so that these tweets were no longer visible outside of your Circle."

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The Guardian reports:

Since Elon Musk acquired the company in late 2022, Twitter has shed at least 60% of its headcount, with wave after wave of layoffs stripping teams to the bone. Over the same period, the site has experienced numerous outages, leading Musk to declare that it would not be stable until a ';complete rewrite' of the site's underlying code was completed.

The company stated, "Twitter is committed to protecting the privacy of the people who use our service, and we understand the risks that an incident like this can introduce and we deeply regret this happened."

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The Guardian's full report is available at this link (subscription required).