The great Twitter willy waving massacre

I woke this morning and did my usually routine of grabbing the iPhone and checking my email, my text messages and my Twitter feed in that order. Oddly, some people on Twitter appeared to be complaining that their followers had been massacred. Follower numbers had dropped dramatically overnight, they said. I checked my follower count and discovered my faithful followers had escaped largely unhurt from whatever it was that had attacked them. Perhaps it was another Twitter security scare? Nope. OK, maybe one of those hashtag marketing schemes had fulfilled my prophecy and finally started to destroy the Twitter userbase? Kind of, as it happens.