Every public update sent to Twitter from anywhere in the world 24/7 can be instantly indexed and made discoverable via our newly launched real-time search. What was that loud noise outside your apartment? Did you just feel an earthquake? What do people think about your company, your product, or your city? With this newly launched feature, Twitter has become something unexpectedly important—a discovery engine for finding out what is happening right now.

Searching Outside the Box

Twitter teaches us new and amazing things every day and a big lesson learned is that search is so much more than a box and a button. As public tweets fly in from around the globe, we analyze them to detect when certain words or phrases occur with higher frequency. These trending phrases are surfaced in the Twitter home page just under the new search box and they're updated throughout the day. Built on our search technology, trends are a compelling if rudimentary way to explore a collective global consciousness.

A Simple Approach

Accessing Twitter.com is a simple experience—you sign in and read the updates from the accounts you have chosen to follow. If you've been using Twitter for a while, you've probably curated an interesting collection of updates from friends, family, co-workers, businesses, media organizations, and maybe even a favorite celebrity. With the addition of search, you can ask Twitter to build you a fresh timeline of updates based on a keyword or phrase. It's a whole new experience with a familiar look and feel.

Saving Your Searches

If you find yourself searching for the same word or phrase on a regular basis, then you'll probably like using "save this search" which, when clicked, will place those keywords as links into your home page just under the search box. This gives you one-click access to your favorite searches. To remove the saved search links, click the word again and notice the new option to, "Remove this saved search." We've also added an option to collapse your list of saved searches as well as the icons of the accounts you are following for a cleaner view.

This week, unauthorized access to Twitter was gained by an outside party. Our initial security reviews and investigations indicate that no account information was altered or removed in any way. However, we discovered that 10 individual accounts were viewed during this unauthorized access.

Personal information that may have been viewed on these 10 individual accounts includes email address, mobile phone number (if one was associated with the account), and the list of accounts blocked by that user. We have personally contacted Twitter users whose accounts were compromised via this unauthorized access.

Password information was not revealed or altered, nor were personal messages (direct messages) viewed. Twitter takes security very seriously so we will be conducting a thorough, independent security audit of all internal systems and implementing additional anti-intrusion measures to further safeguard user data.

The recent race to 1M followers between @cnnbrk and @aplusk was mostly just for kicks. Nevertheless, it wasn't all fun and games because it made a difference in raising awareness for Malaria No More, a nonprofit organization in New York that aims to end deaths caused by malaria in Africa.

OAuth is an open protocol that Twitter is experimenting with along with other companies such as Yahoo, Netflix, and Google. The idea is that folks can use awesome Twitter related applications and services like We Follow or TipJoy without giving away their account credentials. Our implementation of OAuth is in a beta testing mode right now and we are in close contact with the consortium of engineers who continue to define this open protocol.

This week, we received word from the folks at OAuth that they were looking closely at a security issue within the protocol. We take security seriously and felt the responsible thing to do was temporarily disable OAuth while this matter was sorted out. Yahoo and others made similar decisions. The developers working on Twitter projects that are in our beta test group felt this disruption the hardest and their patience is extremely appreciated.

It's important to us that we support the ecosystem and developers that have grown around Twitter. Communication is a big part of this support but so is moving quickly and responsibly when security is involved. As we move further away from beta testing, Twitter's OAuth support will grow more dependable and many of us will be able to take advantage of applications that incorporate the protocol.

We're in contact with Twitter developers helping us test OAuth as well as the folks behind the protocol and the other companies using it. We're expecting service to return later today even better and stronger than before.

On a weekend normally reserved for bunnies, a worm took center stage. A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program sometimes introduced by folks with malicious intent to do some harm to a network. Please note that no passwords, phone numbers, or other sensitive information was compromised as part of these attacks.

The worm introduced to Twitter this weekend was similar to the famous Samy worm which spread across the popular MySpace social-networking site a while back. At that time, MySpace filed a lawsuit against the virus creator which resulted in a felony charge and sentencing. Twitter takes security very seriously and we will be following up on all fronts.

What Went Down?

At about 2AM on Saturday, four accounts were created that began spreading a worm on Twitter. From 7:30AM until 11AM PST, our security team worked on eliminating the vectors that could identify this worm. At that time, about 90 accounts were compromised. We identified and secured these accounts.

Later in the afternoon, a second wave of the worm hit Twitter and this time it was much more intense. We got back to work and the situation was contained. About 100 accounts were compromised. Again, we identified and secured the accounts. We also identified and deleted malicious content that could work to further spread the worm.

On Sunday morning, we had another bout of attacks. Our team quickly pulled together and started fighting the attackers in real time. Again, we secured the accounts that had been compromised and removed any content that might help spread the worm. All told, we identified and deleted almost 10,000 tweets that could have continued to spread the worm.

[Update] Late Sunday night and into the wee hours of Monday we fought off a fourth attack. Once again, we secured the compromised accounts and deleted any material that would further propagate the worm.

Now What?

We are still reviewing all the details, cleaning up, and we remain on alert. Every time we battle an attack, we evaluate our web coding practices to learn how we can do better to prevent them in the future. We will conduct a full review of the weekend activities. Everything from how it happened, how we reacted, and preventative measures will be covered.

In addition to making Twitter stronger and more secure, we will share the information we have learned with our friends at other popular web based services so they can make sure they have the right systems in place for dealing with the same kind of malicious activity. Our support team will have lots of email to go through on Monday so please bear with us and thanks for your patience.

We have no official business arrangement with a consulting agency recently created in the UK calling itself "Twitter Partners." We have spoken with these folks in person and we wish them well as they endeavor to add value to the ecosystem that is growing around Twitter.

However, the name, branding, and suggestion that Twitter has some kind of equity partnership or an agreement of any kind in place is misleading and wrong. We'll be working with Peter and his team to clear up this confusion.

The folks at Sprint have a new nationwide television ad running and they've included Twitter along with other services people use and depend on such as mobile phones, email, texting, and Google which is really cool for us. Even more fun is that they took the little blue bird that my long time collaborator on fun design and illustration projects Phil and I drew and made it into a 3D animation. Love it!

Update: We finished early and service is back.

We've isolated many different parts of the Twitter system such that they can scale independently. This means a problem with a particular subsystem can be addressed without causing disruption to the service as a whole.

Although we've made lots of progress separating these subsystems, not all aspects of Twitter are isolated in this manner. In certain cases, we still need to place the service in maintenance mode to update or improve parts of the overall system.

Our tech team wasn't able to perform some necessary maintenance strategically planned for a window of time very early Sunday morning where it would affect the least number of folks so we're doing it right now. For the next hour, Twitter will be placed in maintenance mode.

Thank you for your patience while we hustle to get this work done. We expect the upgrade will take one hour and then the service will be back. Everyone at Twitter uses Twitter so we're as eager to have it back as you are.

My inbox is flooded this morning with requests for a response to the latest Internet speculation about where Twitter is headed. It should come as no surprise that Twitter engages in discussions with other companies regularly and on a variety of subjects.

Our goal is to build a profitable, independent company and we're just getting started. We've got just over thirty employees now and we're working out of a loft in San Francisco's SoMA neighborhood. By the way, we're hiring talented people if you want to join us.

Old Idea, Awesome Experience

We went back to the original sketch and made everything far more awesome. Currently, a small subset of Twitter users are trying this new search feature in the sidebar of their Twitter home page. When you do a search, you don't go to another page, the relevant tweets instantly show up where you'd expect them to—right on your home page where tweets love to be.


This way of experiencing search is aligned with Twitter's simple approach. Normally, the tweets you would see on your home page are from sources of information that you have curated over time—in other words, the accounts you chose to follow. When you use search, you're asking for any tweets that contain the word or phrase you're interested in right now.

Saved Searches and Trends

We've added a few other features to this design. If there's a search you want to do on a regular basis, you can "save" the search. That will place the word or term permanently in your sidebar for easy access. So if you want to know what people are saying about the city you live in, the products you use, or just something weird, it becomes a link on your home page.

Twitter Search is an engine for discovering what is happening right now but it doesn't always have to be a box and a button. Trends are words or phrases being referenced with more frequency suggesting that something interesting might be happening. When you click on a trend link, you can read the tweets and find out what's up. Trends is in beta—but it has potential.

Give It To Me Now!

We are loving this implementation of Twitter Search and the technical infrastructure to support it is mostly in place. We'll gather a bit more feedback from our test group and then get these features out to everyone as soon as possible. As always, Search and Trends are part of the Twitter API so developers can continue making super cool Twitter applications.