Twitter's new ephemeral tweets, or "fleets," have been hit by a bug that allows them to be accessed long after their supposed 24-hour expiration time, less than a week after the feature launched.
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Fleets are short stories made up of photos or videos with overlaying text. Much like stories on Instagram or Facebook, fleets are located at the top of the Twitter timeline.
According to Techcrunch, the bug allowed fleets to be viewed and downloaded by other users without notifying their creator. Details of the bug were posted in a series of tweets over the weekend. Twitter soon acknowledged the issue and says a fix is on the way.
“We're aware of a bug accessible through a technical workaround where some Fleets media URLs may be accessible after 24 hours," a Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch. "We are working on a fix that should be rolled out shortly."
The workaround refers to a developer app that could reportedly scrape fleets from public accounts through Twitter's API. However, once Twitter's fix is applied, URLs for fleets won't work whether they're active or expired.
Twitter says it doesn't delete fleets from its servers for up to 30 days, and it may retain fleets for longer if they violate its rules.
Top Rated Comments
Yep. Never trust any service which says they delete your content. After all they need an opportunity to monetize it. 24 hours just isn’t enough time.Like they are really deleted. Twitter keeps them forever internally. o_O
I am not a Twitter user - just have a look when others post about tweets. But I am trying to get my head around why people would use them? When there are so many ways of recording them - such as a simple screenshot.
Well the name "fleet" is not very far off a toilet connotation.I don't see any sense about it beyond other social media like Instagram or Snapchat, but here, Spain, even one sports newspaper has just put up "Stories" on the home page of the newspaper, nothing surprises me now, waiting for a toilet with "Stories" or something like that.