On Tuesday afternoon, Twitter started sending weird notifications with seemingly random characters in them to users.
We reached out to Twitter to figure out what’s going on and we will update this post as soon as we hear back. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that the same thing is happening to his account and that he is “on it.”
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A few minutes after his first tweet, Dorsey said that the issue “Should be fixed now,” and that the were working to understand “why it happened.”
Shortly after, Twitter posted via its official Support account that the codes are “how we talk to your phone.”
“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,” the company wrote. “It’s fixed, we’re good.”
Dorsey also posted an explanation from his team on Twitter.
“We send an invisible background notification to the app with badge counts (mainly unread notifications, DMs, etc.),” Dorsey’s tweet read. “The issue caused these notifications to become visible for a short period of time. We don’t know exactly why, but quickly reverted.”
This story has been updated to include new information.