Bosses at the social media networking website were forced to reset accounts after a major security loophole was uncovered.That meant celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, who has built up a massive list of 3.5 million followers, were left with no followers at all.

The bug allowed Twitter users to force a celebrity to follow them. That would also have opened up high profile users to spammers and abusive messages. Twitter was forced to wipe people's accounts to fix the problem.

"We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to 'force' other users to follow them," the social networking site said. "We're now working to rollback all abuse of the bug that took place."