Twitter descended into confusion today when a loophole in the Twitter system forced the company to wipe the addresses of its 100 million users clean. Suddenly no one, including the many celebrities who use the social networking site to keep in touch with fans, had any followers at all. Talk about leveling the playing field of the internet’s greatest popularity contest. Hot or not, for at least two hours this morning, everyone was the same.

Users could post messages, they just couldn’t tell who could read them. That didn’t stop celebs like Ashton Kutcher, a Twitter fanatic, from keeping his posts up to date with: “twitter is being hacked by some turkish hacker. haha I have 0 followers” and “Whew! There’s an update from Twitter, ‘missing relationships are being restored.’” His wife, Demi Moore, added: “The turkish hacker is really doing a number on twitter wow!’

I think Perez Hilton said it best though: “We will all remember today! The daytwitter exploded.”

The problem apparently originated from a Turkish computer expert who posted details of a loophole in Twitters system that would allow users to “force” others to follow them. All you had to do was type “accept@username” and the user, no matter how famous, would be following your Tweets. Twitter spotted the bug and deliberately erased everyone’s address books to fix it. Now, apparently, things should be back to normal.