Twitter made its Fleets available to everyone late last week. And already the feature has a major bug that render it pointless. The bug in question makes it so that Fleets sort of last longer than its intended 24-hour lifespan.
TechCrunch reports that the bug allows anyone to access and download a user’s fleets without triggering notifications. This means that the poster doesn’t get informed of who saw them, allowing people to anonymously save them for after they expire. Though this does require using an app that interacts with Twitter’s back-end systems via its developer API.
But if you have such a thing, you can retrieve a list of fleets. These show up as a list of URLs, each leading to a fleet that will be loaded as an image or video. And even after the 24-hour expiry period, these fleets URLs will still be accessible, even if they’re no longer visible on the public side of the service.
Twitter says that it is aware of this bug, and is currently working on a fix. But even after the fix is rolled out, the company says that it won’t delete fleets from its servers. These will still last for up to 30 days, or even longer if they violate its rules.
(Source: TechCrunch)
