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Twitter sends mysterious, nonsensical notifications to users

If you just received a string of random numbers and letters, you're not alone.

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Morgan Little Senior Director, Audience
Morgan leads the teams managing CNET's presence and content across social media, news platforms and more after stints in the marketing world and LA Times. Eventually his last byline on the site will be about something other than Godzilla
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Morgan Little

Starting at around 9:30 a.m. PT, Twitter users with mobile notifications turned on started to receive alerts that said... nothing. The messages, containing strings of nonsensical characters and numbers, swamped phones, but when opened, they simply went to whatever part of Twitter users last had open.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey acknowledged the issue Tuesday morning, in a tweet showing a bundle of his own errant notifications. "We're seeing this issue too," said Dorsey's tweet. "On it."

Dorsey latter added that the issue "should be fixed now."

Twitter's support account later explained that the red bubbles that appear alongside notifications were being shown as numbers as code, not in their intended form.

But even though there's an explanation for what happened to many peoples' notifications, the exact cause of the notifications remain a mystery. Dorsey tweeted that his team said: "We don't know exactly why, but quickly reverted."

As you'd expect, during the peak the notification deluge, Twitter was a mix of confusion and comedy.

When reached for comment, Twitter highlighted Dorsey's earlier tweet. So far, @TwitterSupport has been silent on the issue.

Updated, 12:21 p.m. PT to include Twitter's tweets on what happened with the notifications.

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