TweetDeck shutdown was due to a teen's errant heart

The shutdown of TweetDeck can be attributed to an Austrian teen's heart; an emoji heart that is. Florian (who goes by FiroXL on Twitter) spoke with CNN via Twitter and says that he was just experimenting when he discovered that using a "♥" created an opening in Tweetdeck's software, allowing for someone to inject computer program commands via a tweet. Without even meaning to, Firo stumbled on a software bug.

The real problem with Firo's find was that real hackers came crawling out of the woodwork to lend their digital signatures to the vulnerability and as PCMag reports, thousands of Twitter accounts inadvertently retweeting a script ending in a heart symbol.


A rough translation of the tweet: "whether it works well"

After an initial fix that didn't quite take, Twitter briefly closed the service, causing outrage, confusion, and fodder for jokes across social media. Eventually, the company patched the hole and returned TweetDeck to full service, apologizing for the inconvenience.

The 19-year-old culprit told PCMag in an email that "you don't expect TweetDeck to make such a big mistake. This is a horrible issue."

No "♥"!