Twitter Urges All 330 Million Users To Change Passwords After Bug Exposes Them

Another day, another press release urging people to change their passwords. In a blog post, Thursday, Twitter advised all of its 330 million users to immediately change their passwords after they say a bug exposed them.

Twitter says that due to an error, every users' password was stored in plain text in an internal log, just waiting for people to hack into it. Twitter claims that there is no indication that the log was breached or misused.

As Twitter explains, it's standard to store passwords using a technique called hashing, which replaces your password with random letters, allowing for system authentication without exposing people's passwords to employees or other parties.

If this seems eerily familiar, it's probably because you're constantly getting emails from large companies asking you to change your password. Large data breaches at companies like Delta, TaskRabbit and Equifax have exposed massive amounts of people's data in the last year. If Twitter is telling the truth about a lack of a breach, this exposure seems slightly less worrying than news that your information was actually stolen, but it's still pretty scary to think that all of our passwords were just sitting there waiting to be taken.

You can change your password here, and check if your password is out there here.