Teen Says He Took Down TweetDeck by 'Accident'

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Image: Mashable composite

By Samantha Murphy Kelly2014-06-11 20:40:07 UTC

An Austrian teenager is claiming responsibility for the TweetDeck outage that took the social-media dashboard offline, after he stumbled upon a security vulnerability by "accident."

A 19-year-old, who goes by the name Firo Xl on Twitter, said the incident wasn't a hack, and is "sad" about how things turned out. At 8:05 a.m. ET on Wednesday, @Firoxl tweeted the word "Test" that included javascript tags and a heart emoji. Writing in German, he added the message, "I wonder if this will work." His tweets were first discovered by tech site The Verge .

See also: TweetDeck Is Back After a Vulnerability Forced It Offline

Although the vulnerability was first discovered in 2011, Firo said he was unaware of its existence, and didn't realize the tweet's repercussions.

"It wasn't a hack," he tweeted to CNN. "It was some sort of accident."

Firo, who doesn't appear to be part of a hacking group, publicly reported the incident to @TweetDeck via Twitter. The company has yet to confirm or deny that his tweet was responsible for taking down the site.

Earlier on Wednesday, TweetDeck disabled access to its popular web app, after releasing a statement on Twitter that said it was the subject of an XSS ("cross-site scripting") security vulnerability that could allow hackers to gain access to users' accounts. Although TweetDeck is back up and running, the company is still urging users to log out of the app, and sign back in to "apply the fix."

TweetDeck is Twitter's in-house app, which lets users create and build custom timelines, and keep track of lists, searches and activities in one place.

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Topics: Mobile, Tech, tweetdeck, Twitter, World