Starting at around 9:30 a.m. PT, Twitter users with mobile notifications turned on started to receive alerts that said… nothing. The messages, containing strings of nonsensical characters and numbers, swamped phones, but when opened, they simply went to whatever part of Twitter users last had open.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey acknowledged the issue Tuesday morning, in a tweet showing a bundle of his own errant notifications. “We’re seeing this issue too,” said Dorsey’s tweet. “On it.”
Dorsey latter added that the issue “should be fixed now.”
Should be fixed now. Working to understand why it happened
— jack (@jack) October 16, 2018
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Twitter’s support account later explained that the red bubbles that appear alongside notifications were being shown as numbers as code, not in their intended form.
You know those red bubbles that appear when you get notifications? Usually, you wouldn’t see this in numbers and code, but that’s how we talk to your phone so you get those notifications. It’s fixed, we’re good. https://t.co/JA71hewEvS
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) October 16, 2018
But even though there’s an explanation for what happened to many peoples’ notifications, the exact cause of the notifications remain a mystery. Dorsey tweeted that his team said: “We don’t know exactly why, but quickly reverted.”
The why, from team: “We send an invisible background notification to the app with badge counts (mainly unread notifications, DMs, etc.). The issue caused these notifications to become visible for a short period of time. We don’t know exactly why, but quickly reverted.”
— jack (@jack) October 16, 2018
As you’d expect, during the peak the notification deluge, Twitter was a mix of confusion and comedy.
When reached for comment, Twitter highlighted Dorsey’s earlier tweet. So far, @TwitterSupport has been silent on the issue.
Updated, 12:21 p.m. PT to include Twitter’s tweets on what happened with the notifications.