In a company blog post on Monday, popular microblogging service Twitter said that the bug that recently afflicted the site, forcing some celebrity tweeters to follow a bogus Twitter account, has been fixed.

Twitter also revealed that it had to initiate a reset procedure for the affected celebrity accounts - including those of Ashton Kutcher and Mark Zuckerberg – so as to kill off the bug which was being exploited to force celebrities to “follow” anybody who was using the bug.

During the course of the bug-fixing process, the numbers of followers of the affected celebrities had to be temporarily reset to zero; however, the numbers were back to normal after some time.

Noting that the glitch neither made any private tweets public nor compromised protected updates, the Twitter blog post said: “We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to “force” other users to follow them. We're now working to rollback all abuse of the bug that took place.”

In addition, according to tech blog Gizmodo, the recent glitch not only forced some tweeters to follow phony accounts, but also enabled users to add on as many followers to their own accounts as they wanted – by merely tweeting “accept” and then “@” and writing any Twitter ‘user name’ of their choice.

However, Gizmodo specified that the auto-follow glitch could only be exploited on the Twitter Website, not on any third-party apps.