Twitter (TWTR) picked a heck of a day to notify its 336 million members to change their passwords because of a security bug.  Thursday's warning on World Password Day, no less, sent shares reeling in after-hours trading and provoked the kind of privacy fears that have dogged Facebook (FB) for weeks.  In Twitter's case, the scare was temporary.

Twitter Avoids Ruffling Feathers With Prompt Response to Password Scare

Twitter Warns 336M Users to Change Passwords
Shoshanna Delventhal
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Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey took to his Twitter account, following up on the company blog post, to reiterate that the firm has "no indication of breach or misuse," and warned users because "it's important for us to be open about this internal defect." Twitter also disclosed the password flaw in a regulatory filing Thursday.  "We recently discovered a bug where account passwords were being written to an internal log before completing a masking/hashing process," wrote Dorsey, who is also the CEO of the mobile payments company Square Inc. ( SQ).  The news comes as media giants such as Facebook Inc. ( FB), Alphabet Inc. ( GOOGL) and Twitter face heightened scrutiny regarding their data-driven advertising businesses.

Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey took to his Twitter account, following up on the company blog post, to reiterate that the firm has "no indication of breach or misuse," and warned users because "it's important for us to be open about this internal defect." Twitter also disclosed the password flaw in a regulatory filing Thursday.  "We recently discovered a bug where account passwords were being written to an internal log before completing a masking/hashing process," wrote Dorsey, who is also the CEO of the mobile payments company Square Inc. ( SQ).  The news comes as media giants such as Facebook Inc. ( FB), Alphabet Inc. ( GOOGL) and Twitter face heightened scrutiny regarding their data-driven advertising businesses.

Twitter Warns 336M Users to Change Passwords