Many of you likely had panic attacks early this morning when you logged into Twitter to catch up on status messages. Your follower and following numbers were probably reset to a big, fat zero. Did you have a panic attack and start to feel lightheaded? Don’t worry… you weren’t suddenly unpopular and unloved. This was just another Twitter bug – albeit a very strange one.

In order to kill a bug that allowed a user to force others to follow them, Twitter temporarily reset all of the counts to nothing. According to the status blog, “cleanup of the spurious followings generated a result of this bug” was completed by mid-afternoon. “If you are still seeing folks you are following who you didn’t choose to follow, please use the block or unfollow tools to remedy.”

According to the original story on Gizmodo this morning, the hole let users grab new followers without having to ask their permission. Thousands of people flocked to the web interface to get famous people on their “Followers” list. All one had to do was tweeted “accept username” and wait a few moments. The user – even those who have Verified Accounts – would appear in your list of fans automagically.

The bug was accidentally discovered by a Turkish user, who is a fan of a band named Accept. He wanted the World to know how great he thinks their music is, so he sent out a simple tweet: Accept pwnz. A few moments later, he received notification that the user with the Twitter handle of pwnz was suddenly following. The Turk tested this with other user names, and then wrote a blog post to describe his findings.

If you were someone who took part in the force-accept frenzy today, you’ll probably be disappointed to see that your list of followers has been returned to its normal state. Is it really cool to have someone follow you unwillingly? Did you take part in the Twitter bug of the day by forcing random people to check out what you had to say in your stream?