Twitter suspends bot spoiling five-letter puzzle craze Wordle

Microblogging platform Twitter has suspended a bot that was spoiling Wordle, the five-letter puzzle craze that has gone global. It was posting offensive messages that included spoilers for the next day’s game.

The website-only word game has seen a recent surge in popularity thanks to celebrities like Jimmy Fallon.

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The once-a-day online word game, originally created in October by former Reddit software engineer Josh Wardle, can only be played on his website and does not have a mobile app.

However, several developers have created identical app versions to cash in on surging demand for the game, with unsuspecting users driving up downloads of the clone apps.

Part of what makes Wordle special is that it costs nothing to play, and is also, more unusually, ad-free. 

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Its developer Steven Cravotta, now 24, says he initially "had no idea what was going on" when his app starting logging more than 40,000 daily downloads.

"I didn't know it was a craze," Cravotta told The Wall Street Journal. 

Josh Wardle's game has flooded Twitter and Facebook timelines in recent weeks as players posted their scores. It gives a player six chances to guess the day's secret word, which has five letters, and the aim is to figure out the secret word with the fewest guesses.

Wordle is already being adapted into other languages, including French, having swiftly conquered the English-speaking world, although, spoiler alert, the Wednesday word's American spelling triggered howls of online player protests from its creator's fellow Britons.

(With inputs from agencies)