Tweetdeck, a popular third-party application that offers Twitter users more powerful features, was forced to shut down its service Wednesday morning due to spam tweets.

Twitter users were spammed with multiple re-tweets (re-posts) and pop-ups. Hackers also gained access to some accounts.

Tweetdeck is often used by larger companies because it gives them the power to respond and view multiple tweets and timelines at once.

Early Wednesday morning, one of Hilton Hotel's Twitter accounts, as well as the FOX 6 News channel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, retweeted a gibberish tweet.

The tweet was posted in the morning and less than an hour later, it had already been re-tweeted over 36,000 times.

Tweetdeck allows automatic retweeting, which resulted in the quick spread of the tweet.

Twitter and Tweetdeck were forced to disable Tweetdeck's services for most of the day Wednesday.

Users should be careful when using third party apps like Tweetdeck. But, even Twitter was taken down in a similar hacking situation back in 2010.

Here's an image of the spam tweet that was re-sent by thousands of users Wednesday morning:

Make sure you have the latest anti-virus software and that you keep your passwords hard to guess to avoid your Twitter accounts becoming compromised.

Update (6:03 pm):

It appears that an Austrian teenager named Florian — who goes by "Firo" — has "taken credit" for the "hack." Actually, Firo told CNN he was behind the TweetDeck bug gone awry, but that it was an accident, not an intentional hack. He said he was just figuring out on Wednesday that "&hearts" makes a "♥" symbol in HTML and was just experimenting with it when he discovered that using the symbol in TweetDeck created an opening in the software which allowed for anyone to infuse computer commands remotely, via tweeting.

"It wasn't a hack. It was some sort of accident," said Firo.

Were you affected by the Tweetdeck/Twitter virus today? Did you notice any big company sending this tweet? Leave a comment below.