I stumbled upon a minor problem while looking into a Microsoft Hardware issue. The Microsoft Hardware Twitter account used to be at @MSFTHardware. They stopped tweeting to the account in 2013 and transitioned to just tweeting to the @Microsoft account.
There’s nothing wrong here. It makes sense for Microsoft to consolidate their publications on Twitter. In the beginning of 2016, Microsoft deleted the @MSFTHardware Twitter account. The problem was that up until earlier this month, Microsoft continued to link and direct site visitors to the account.
Somebody happened to snatch up the handle for @msfthardware and was able to benefit from about 6 months of Microsoft linking to their account. Microsoft has just recently corrected the page to link to @Microsoft. Fortunately, the account taking over the handle does not seem to have tried impersonating Microsoft or phishing users. It seems like a bot account to me and they did not gain nearly the 84,000 followers that Microsoft had when they were running the account but it still certainly helped get more traffic.
