Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR)’s iOS app was affected by a bug yesterday that was causing it to crash every time a link was viewed. This happened even when the link was not clicked. However, the bug has been successfully squashed by Twitter.
Twitter kills the bug
A tweet containing a link is to be blamed for the bug. The code of that link came from Punycode, which is a character converter. Emoji, umlauts and other non-text characters are displayed with the help of the character converter. A report from The Next Web states that the specific tweet causing the Twitter app for the iPhone and the iPad to crash was discovered by Twitter user @CPVideoMaker.
Twitter responded to people’s complaints, and on Monday a tweet was posted by the software engineering manager at Twitter, Michael Margolis, informing users that the issue should be resolved now and asking if problems were still faced by any of the platform’s users. While most users responded positively, there was one user who claimed that the problem persists on iOS 8.1 on an iPhone 6 Plus, says a report from CNET.
No effect from the bug could be seen on Twitter apps on other platforms, and third party apps were also not affected by it.
What helped in spreading the bug?
While it is believed that one tweet should not impact many people, the problem existed because apps were crashing simply by viewing the link, even though it is not clicked. The impact snowballed because the specific code responsible for the crash was shared by Twitter users with the wrong intentions of crashing others’ apps.
Those whose apps crashed later complained to Twitter of the problem they faced. The issue quickly spread to a large number of app users, and frustration built up. This was evident from the tweets made by people on the social network. They used alternative apps and expressed their anger, saying that the Punycode tweet had rendered their app useless.
On Monday, Twitter shares were down 3.16%, and year to date, shares are down almost 37%. In pre-market trading today, shares were up .52% to $40.68.
