Security News > 2022 > August > Twitter Exposes Personal Information for 5.4 Million Accounts
Twitter accidentally exposed the personal information-including phone numbers and email addresses-for 5.4 million accounts.
In January 2022, we received a report through our bug bounty program of a vulnerability in Twitter's systems.
As a result of the vulnerability, if someone submitted an email address or phone number to Twitter's systems, Twitter's systems would tell the person what Twitter account the submitted email addresses or phone number was associated with, if any.
So after forcing users to enter a phone number to continue using twitter, despite twitter having no need to know the users phone number, they then leak the phone numbers and associated accounts.
If you operate a pseudonymous Twitter account, we understand the risks an incident like this can introduce and deeply regret that this happened.
To keep your identity as veiled as possible, we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account.