Twitter Follower Count Error?

Posted on May 25, 2007

A glitch is causing some Twitterers to have surprising gains of thousands of new followers. Twitter users that have gained hundreds or thousands of new subscribers from the error in the last 24 to 48 hours just started showing up on Twitterholic, a website that ranks Twitterers by followers, friends and updates. Here are a few of the big jumps. The jumps occured over the last day or two.

Jelijah: Jumped from 5 followers to 1,803 followers even though he hasn't updated in a month.

Brad: Jumped from 51 followers to 2,988 followers.

Bill HR: Jumped from 25 followers to 2,974 followers.

TechCrunch: Jumped from 1,942 followers 3,358 followers.

If you go to Twitterholic you can see how these Twitterer's follower counts jumped from a few followers to thousands of followers overnight. These are just of few of large jumps in follower counts. There are probably many others.

This error follows on the recent news about an error that made some people's private tweets public on Twittervision. The privacy error wasn't an error on Twitter.com or an error in the Twitter API. It had to do with the way Twittervision was using Twitter's API. However, this latest problem involving erroneous follower counts is probably a minor bug or glitch that Twitter will need to remedy.

Update: Twitter appears to have corrected the Follower count glitch.