This Is Why You Got Those Weird Twitter Notifications On Your Phone

Don't worry, Jack is on it.

You weren't alone if on Tuesday afternoon your phone was suddenly inundated with strange push alerts from the Twitter app.

The alerts were a string of letters and numbers followed by a colon and a number.

People were very confused.

hey best friends, is anyone else getting this weird twitter notification? 😳

And immediately checked Twitter to see if they were the only ones. (They weren't.)

am i the only one getting those weird twitter notifs?


People were complaining so much that it was kind of weird if you weren't getting them.

Why is everyone but me getting these weird Twitter notifications I'm disappoint

Sorry.

Lmao my notifications are so dry I don't even get the weird twitter notifications everyone else is getting


Even Twitter CEO and cofounder Jack Dorsey was getting them but didn't seem to know why.

We’re seeing this issue too. On it.

Shortly after the alerts started, Dorsey tweeted they had been fixed.

Should be fixed now. Working to understand why it happened

Eventually, the culprit was found. Well, sort of.

According to Twitter Support, that code you were sent is how Twitter tells your app there's a new notification. Usually you just see that as a little bubble, but some sort of error spit out the raw code instead.

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

Why did it happen? That remains a mystery.

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.”


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