In a notice to users, Twitter has revealed that a ‘security incident’ made private tweets shared on Twitter Circles public to other users.

Twitter Circles was released in August 2022 as a feature similar to Close Friends Instagram stories, where users could post tweets only to be shared within a selected group of followers.

Users would select their own circle, where they could share more private tweets that they didn’t want to be publicly published.

According to the company, “only the individuals you’ve added can reply to and interact with the Tweets you share in the circle,” but users have reported otherwise.

Users have claimed that other users outside of their circles have been able to view their private tweets and interact with them. Despite flagging this to Twitter, they’ve only received automated responses from a depleted team – until now.

On 7 May, a notification was sent to affected users claiming a security incident caused the privacy breach, reading as follows, as reported by Bleeping Computer:

“We’re contacting you because your Twitter account may have been potentially impacted by a security incident that occurred earlier this year (April 2023)”, reads a security incident notification sent by Twitter yesterday.

“In April 2023, a security incident may have allowed users outside of your Twitter Circle to see tweets that should have otherwise been limited to the Circle to which you were posting. This issue was identified by our security team and immediately fixed so that these tweets were no longer visible outside of your Circle.”

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“We’ve conducted a thorough investigation to understand how this occurred and have addressed this issue. Twitter is committed to protecting the privacy of the people who use our service, and we understand the risks that an incident like this can introduce and we deeply regret this happened.”

Twitter has not revealed why they think this incident occurred, nor have they addresses similar complaints surrounding the tweets of private accounts being shared to a wider audience.

Since Elon Musk bought the company, Twitter has laid off around 60% of its staff, and the site has faced major outages since.