If your weekend back-and-forth of Snapchat selfies was invaded by strangers sending you ads for penis-enlargement pills, you weren't alone. Snapchat is having a spam crisis.
Valleywag reported that over the weekend, several users said they were experiencing "waves and waves" of spam in their feeds, rendering the self-destructing photo and video service borderline unusable. On Monday, the company once again found itself in an increasingly familiar position, apologizing for the weekend's spamathon in a very concise blog post.
Essentially, said Snapchat, all that spam isn't our fault; it's just a growing pain that wildly successful companies all go through. "While we expect to minimize spam, it is the consequence of a quickly growing service," they wrote.
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Just how big Snapchat has gotten, though, is still a mystery to outsiders: The company declines to release exact figures about how many people use it, although that number is apparently impressive enough to warrant a $3 billion buyout offer from Facebook.
In fact, some critics openly wondered if the weekend's spam flood had anything to do with a recent massive data breach. The hack, which occurred over a week ago, allowed hackers to publish the private logins, aliases, and phone numbers of 4.6 million Snapchat accounts. Worse still, the company was said to be aware of the security vulnerability for months.
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel publicly denied the two events were related, however:
So what should you do if you're suddenly inundated with bots pumping your feed you with black-hat marketing tactics? "To help prevent spam from entering your feed, you can adjust your settings to determine who can send you Snaps," wrote Snapchat. "We recommend 'Only My Friends' :)"
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