Twitter Has Little Explanation for Bizarre Benghazi Photo Bug

A day after a strange and gory political image cropped up in place of all images on Twitter for some users, the company is offering no detail on what exactly happened or how.

Around 9:30 or 10 p.m. EST, a bloody image relating to the September attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, began replacing all graphics in some users' Twitter feeds (including at least one Mashable staffer). Any Instagram photo in your feed, for example, would have turned up the Benghazi image. In an expanded Twitter card for a linked article, the article's thumbnail would show the Benghazi image.

A Twitter spokesperson told Mashable the issue was a simple bug that was quickly resolved, but offered no more detail or explanation for why that particular image. "I'm not sure how else to say this: It was a bug," says Twitter communications staffer Carolyn Penner.

For many who experienced it, the bug seemed like a politically-motivated hack of the social network.

The image includes the names of the four Americans killed in the Benghazi attack, as well as an interpretation of the American flag, made from the Obama campaign logo and five bloody lines protruding from a drawing of what appears to be the hand of a fallen American.

Twitter searches at the time for the terms "Benghazi" or "Libya" returned dozens of users asking or complaining about the bug or hack. This image, for example, is pulled from a Storify compiled by CNBC social media producer Eli Langer on Thursday night:

This is an iPhone screenshot taken by Mashable tech reporter Emily Price:

Not everyone saw that Benghazi image, however. All the images in my Twitter web feed — and those of two other Mashable staffers — were replaced with a photo that appears to be of a tattoo on someone's forearm or leg.

Here's what showed up in place of Instagram photos, article link cards and even Foursquare check-ins:

The Benghazi image didn't come out of nowhere. A search on the Instagram tracking site Statigram for the hashtag #Benghazi returns a few copies of the same picture posted by people over the past several weeks. (None of those people appear to have also posted the tattoo shot.)

Images appeared to return to normal after roughly 20 minutes.

Given that the Benghazi image was already on the web for some time, there is plausibility to the theory that this was nothing but a simple bug that just so happened to convert all images posted in some users' feeds to some random picture, which just happened to be Benghazi-themed (or in rarer cases, the strange tattoo).

Given the photo's explicitly political nature and the fact that Twitter had just been the victim of a widespread password hack, however, it would not be beyond the bounds of reason to think that a bug was somehow exploited to show that image specifically, or that someone successfully hacked the social network to spam users.

Did you see anything like this in your Twitter feed on Thursday? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, jcarillet