This week, unauthorized access to Twitter was gained by an outside party. Our initial security reviews and investigations indicate that no account information was altered or removed in any way. However, we discovered that 10 individual accounts were viewed during this unauthorized access.

OAuth is an open protocol that Twitter is experimenting with along with other companies such as Yahoo, Netflix, and Google. The idea is that folks can use awesome Twitter related applications and services like We Follow or TipJoy without giving away their account credentials. Our implementation of OAuth is in a beta testing mode right now and we are in close contact with the consortium of engineers who continue to define this open protocol.

We have no official business arrangement with a consulting agency recently created in the UK calling itself “Twitter Partners.” We have spoken with these folks in person and we wish them well as they endeavor to add value to the ecosystem that is growing around Twitter.

However, the name, branding, and suggestion that Twitter has some kind of equity partnership or an agreement of any kind in place is misleading and wrong. We’ll be working with Peter and his team to clear up this confusion.

Update: We finished early and service is back.

We’ve isolated many different parts of the Twitter system such that they can scale independently. This means a problem with a particular subsystem can be addressed without causing disruption to the service as a whole.

Although we’ve made lots of progress separating these subsystems, not all aspects of Twitter are isolated in this manner. In certain cases, we still need to place the service in maintenance mode to update or improve parts of the overall system.