TweetDeck has been taken offline today — allegedly because a bug was allowing at least one user to access other people's accounts without any authorization. TechCrunch reports that a user in Australia discovered he was able to access hundreds of Twitter and Facebook accounts through the Mac client app, just by logging into his own account normally. The user reportedly posted a message from another person's account as proof of the compromise, before alerting TweetDeck — via Twitter, of course — with a screenshot of some of the accounts he claims to have been able to access.

Twitter's latest version of TweetDeck tried to mend fences with power users by adding several new features; the app's first release after the company's acquisition by Twitter was greeted with a tepid response by many due to the simplification of the overall feature set. While TweetDeck has indeed confirmed the service is down, neither it nor Twitter have commented on the alleged bug, nor provided any timeframe for when the service will be restored. If you still happen to have the AIR-based version of TweetDeck on your machine, however, you'll be happy to know that things seem to be running just fine with the original app.