Deleted tweets revived by Twitter glitch, warn security experts and tech reporters
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Check your Twitter NOW: bug causes deleted tweets to be reshared for some users – potential headache for thousands
If you’ve tweeted and deleted comments you regret, or posted a racy photo you wanted to keep private, it’s now a good idea to make sure everything stays in the trash.
Twitter users reported a nerve-racking new bug this past week that has resurfaced thousands and even tens of thousands of old deleted tweets for some individual profiles.
It’s not yet clear how many profiles were affected by the glitch or why, though some web developers speculate that the undead tweets may have been revived along with a rebooted Twitter backup server.
A security expert and open-source developer reported chasing as many as 34,000 old tweets last week. “This shows why you should never use Twitter,” says the expert Posted on the non-profit Twitter alternative Mastodon.
Open source developer and security expert Dick Morrell discovered that 34,000 of his deleted tweets have mysteriously returned from the trash. Morrell speculated that the troubled social media “presumably revived a server farm,” accidentally resurrecting deletions
“Last November I deleted all my Tweets. Every single one,” Richard “Dick” Morrell, the open-source developer, security expert, and former CTO/Chairman of Internet security firm SmoothWall, told his Mastodon followers. ‘All my likes, my media and retweets. 38,000 tweets gone.”
“I woke up today to find 34,000 of them restored by Twitter, which supposedly brought back a server farm,” Morrell theorized.
Technology reporter Ian Betteridge claimed that the outage had also affected him.
“I erased everything,” he said posted on Mastodon. “Now there are 35,000 tweets again.”
“I’m not sure that’s all I’ve ever done,” Betteridge noted, “but it sure is a lot of content I had removed.”
A self-described “ex-twitter employee” on Mastodon corroborated Morrell’s explanation, posting that “this looks very much like they moved some servers between data centers.”
Twitter’s skeleton crew of surviving site engineers, this poster suggested “failing to properly adjust the topology before re-networking, reviving obsolete data.”
Tech reporter Ian Betteridge claimed the bug made 35,000 of his deleted tweets live again
Twitter’s new owner, billionaire electric car maker Elon Musk, has famously inaugurated his reign as the social media company’s new CEO by carrying a porcelain sink to Twitter’s headquarters. Now, surprisingly, more material is coming onto the platform: old deleted tweets from many users
In an attempt to troubleshoot the issue from the outside, affected Twitter users noted that the issue did not appear to be linked to a third-party app for managing tweets.
Morrell told followers he had used the digital deletion tool To process, which allows users to clean and delete posts from multiple social media sites outside of Twitter, including Reddit, Facebook, and Discord. But a reporter on the edge noted that they experienced the same zombie tweet problem, while using a simpler web service TweetDelete.net.
Adding stress to users is that many of these legacy automated services used to more easily manage or even schedule the deletion of their old tweets have become useless thanks to Musk’s plan to put Twitter’s API behind a paywall. places.
“Without an API, it’s going to take ages to delete all those tweets!!” said one user.
While persistent tweets have long plagued users, thanks to search engine caches and other archiving mechanismsthis issue seems to suggest that Twitter keeps deleted tweets much longer than users might want.
The bug is just the latest in an extremely rocky start to Musk’s tenure, which has seen the platform’s headquarters in San Francisco investigated for possible building code violations, in addition to numerous technical issues plaguing the social media site itself.