No, Twitter has not been hit by a massive spam botnet

They refute themselves here. They say there isn't a massive botnet, but dismiss it by saying spam isn't unique and most of the accounts are deleted now. So, yes, it was a massive botnet. Sure, it's not uncommon and Twitter deals with them regularly, but that doesn't mean it was not hit by a massive botnet, it was.

Well, they also assert that the supposed number of accounts (35,000~) doesn't qualify as "massive".

If Twitter just had 35,000 spam bots in all of Twitter, they'd sign up for that in a heartbeat.

It's not massive to Twitter's spam team but it seems reasonably massive by most standards. I just think it's a bit daft of TNW to dismiss the original author this way.

The 35,000 accounts number was merely the total no. of accounts found from a sample of just 33 tweets. The real total number of bots would be a multiple of 35,000: http://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-fighting-a-massive-bo...

The crux of the story should be XML-RPC and it's delirious security model, not some half-assed contemporary messaging service company.