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Londoners were left puzzled after Transport for London’s main traffic Twitter account shared a string of messages completely full of 0s and 1s.

Confused travellers asked whether the account had been hacked after it posted the mystery tweets on Friday afternoon.

It later emerged that the TfL online account, which issues alerts about traffic in the capital, was using binary code – a system used by computers.

The first message, written in a lengthy series of digits, read: “Matt here again, talk to me.”

Scores of other people skilled in computers replied with comments in binary code.

“Hey Matt, have a great shift,” one person replied completely in binary code, while another person simply wrote “01101110 01100101 01100001 01110100”, which translates to “neat”.

Others flooded the social media worker with questions, including: “What dya think about Brexit?” and discussions on Christmas shopping.

Most people were delighted and made the most of their chance to use binary code, but others thought security on the account had been compromised.

“Is your TfLTrafficNews account hacked?” asked Kyle Lindeque while David Cavanagh said: “Looks like your keyboard isn’t well.”

A spokeswoman for TfL told the Standard that workers on social media accounts are encouraged to use their creativity and added he has been putting out the necessary traffic updates as well.



Computers use binary to store data. Each binary digit, the 0 or 1, is called a "bit" to make a binary number. All software, music and documents are stored using binary code.