A strange bug is making its rounds on the Internet. This bug automatically downloads a torrent file of Twitter's (News - Alert) "Tweet" button when users visit certain websites, and has been reported on sites TechCrunch and Business Insider among others.

Users began to complain that certain websites with the "Tweet" button installed asked them to download a torrent file. TorrentFreak reports that BitTorrent (News - Alert) appears to be associated with the bug. 

BitTorrent is a protocol supporting the practice of peer-to-peer file sharing. It is used to distribute massive amounts of information across the Internet. BitTorrent is one of the most common protocols for transferring large files.

Bram Cohen (News - Alert), a former University at Buffalo graduate student in Computer Science, designed BitTorrent in April of 2001.

TorrentFreak writes, "Instead of loading the iframed HTML for the familiar blue ‘Tweet’ button, website visitors were offered a .torrent file, variously titled ‘widgets_tweet_button.html.torrent’ or ‘widgets-tweet_button.html.torrent. So what was the payload inside the mysterious torrent file? The HTML for Twitter’s button distributed using BitTorrent trackers hosted by Amazon, no less."

A temporary fix for the problem is for publishers to remove all the Twitter share buttons from their sites.

Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service. It enables users to send and read "tweets,” Tweets are text messages 140 words or under in character. People who are registered users can read and post tweets. Unregistered users can only read them. Twitter Inc. is based in San Francisco, but also has offices in New York City, Boston, and San Antonio.

Jack Dorsey created Twitter back in 2006. The service gained instant popularity. In 2012, Twitter had 500 million registered users. Those users posted 340 million tweets per day. Twitter is one of the ten most visited websites on the Internet. 

To date Twitter has had no comment about the bug.