TweetDeck Taken Offline Temporarily After Hacker Havoc

wtf?! pic.twitter.com/B18fUIat2j

— Kevin Smith (@OfficialKLS) June 11, 2014

TweetDeck was taken offline today after hackers exploited a vulnerability to remotely execute JavaScript code and push pop-up messages to users of its Chrome version. Some examples of the pop-ups — “Yo!” and “Please close now TweetDeck, it is not safe.” Several major publishers’ accounts also retweeted the invasive script, including @Salon, @NYTimesbusiness and @ScienceNews.

Initially TweetDeck announced that the issue could be fixed by signing off and back onto TweetDeck, but less than 30 minutes later they took the service off line:

We’ve temporarily taken TweetDeck services down to assess today’s earlier security issue. We’ll update when services are back up.

— TweetDeck (@TweetDeck) June 11, 2014

Postscript: After about an hour offline, TweetDeck service was restored.