Twitter has informed users of its now-defunct Vine platform that their email addresses and in some cases, their phone numbers, were compromised to third parties. The company mentions that the user information was only exposed for a day and that it wasn’t misused, but still, users should be careful and keep an eye on any unusual activity associated with their email accounts.
Vine was a very popular social app at one point but its numbers declined significantly after Instagram added looping videos to its platform and even raised the time limit up to one minute. Twitter eventually had to shut down Vine because it made no sense to keep the service around.
Twitter says that the email addresses and phone numbers of Vine users were exposed due to a bug which was active for only 24 hours before it was patched. It doesn’t believe that this data was misused in any way during this time.
It merits mentioning here that it’s not like Twitter suffered a leak due to a cyberattack or a hack. The bug only made the email addresses and phone numbers that the company had on file available under certain conditions.
Twitter hasn’t provided any details about how the bug was able to do what it did and how it was discovered, it’s not even saying how the bug might have enabled any third-party to view the data.
It’s only informing users about this bug as it wants to be transparent about vulnerabilities, and not because it feels that someone actually misused the data. Nevertheless, Twitter advises users to be careful with emails from unknown senders.