Twitter has warned about 330 million users to change their passwords after a glitch exposed some in plan text on its internal network.
The social media network said Thursday that they had been unintentionally "unmasked" inside the company by a software bug, adding that it found no sign that hackers accessed the exposed data, but advised user to change their passwords to be safe.
Twitter did not say how many passwords were affected.
Chief executive Jack Dorsey tweeted: "We recently discovered a bug where account passwords were being written to an internal log before completing a masking/hashing process. We've fixed, see no indication of breach or misuse, and believe it's important for us to be open about this internal defect".
Twitter practice is to store passwords encrypted, or “hashed,” so they are masked to even people inside the company, Twitter chief technology officer Parag Agrawal explained in a blog post.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we ask that you consider changing your password on all services where you’ve used this password,” Agrawal told users.
“We are very sorry this happened,” he said.
“Due to a bug, passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process,” he said.
“We found this error ourselves, removed the passwords, and are implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again.”
The stumble comes as the sector faces intense scrutiny over the protection of personal data online, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that saw information from tens of millions of Facebook users hijacked and misused.
