Check your Twitter NOW: Bug sees deleted tweets re-shared for some users, causing headaches for thousands
If you’ve tweeted and deleted comments you regret making, or posted a racy photo you wanted to keep private, now would be a good time to make sure everything stays in the trash.
Over the past week, Twitter users have reported a troubling new bug that has resurfaced thousands, if not tens of thousands, of old deleted tweets for some individual profiles.
It’s not yet known how many profiles suffered from the issue or why, although some web developers are speculating that the undead tweets may have been revived with a restarted Twitter backup server.
A security expert and open-source developer said he had a whopping 34,000 old tweets come back to haunt him last week. “This shows why you should NOT use Twitter, ever,” the expert job on nonprofit Twitter alternative Mastodon.
Open source developer and security expert Dick Morrell has discovered that 34,000 of his deleted tweets have mysteriously returned from the trash. Morrell speculated that struggling social media “likely brought back a backup farm”, resurrecting deletions by mistake
“Last November, I deleted all of my Tweets. Every one,” Richard “Dick” Morrell, open source developer, security expert and former CTO/president of internet security firm SmoothWall, told his Mastodon followers. ‘All my likes, media and retweets 38,000 tweets are gone.
“I woke up today to find 34,000 of them restored by Twitter, which presumably brought a farm back up,” Morrell theorized.
Tech Journalist Ian Bettridge claimed that the glitch also affected him.
“I deleted everything,” he said. posted at Mastodon. “Now 35,000 tweets are back.”
“I’m not sure that’s all I’ve ever done,” noted Betteridge, “but it’s definitely a lot of content that I’ve deleted.”
A self-proclaimed “ex-Twitter employee” on Mastodon corroborated Morrell’s explanation, posting that “it’s a lot like moving a bunch of servers between data centers.”
Twitter’s skeleton team of remaining site engineers, this poster suggested “did not properly adjust the topology before reinserting them into the network, resulting in stale data being reactivated.”
Tech journalist Ian Betteridge claimed the bug brought 35,000 of his deleted tweets back to life
Twitter’s new owner, billionaire electric car maker Elon Musk, ushered in his reign as the social media company’s new CEO by carrying a porcelain sink to Twitter’s headquarters. Now more material is making a surprise entry on the platform: many users’ old deleted tweets
Attempting to fix the issue from the outside, concerned Twitter users noted that the issue did not appear to be related to a third-party app for managing tweets.
Morrell told his followers that he used the digital removal tool Write, which helps users clean up and delete posts from several social media sites beyond Twitter, including Reddit, Facebook, and Discord. But a journalist from the edge noted that they encountered the same zombie tweet issue, but used a simpler web service TweetDelete.net.
Adding to user stress, many of those old automated services used to more easily manage or even schedule the deletion of their old tweets have been rendered inoperable thanks to Musk’s plan to put Twitter’s API behind a paywall.
“Without an API, it’s going to take forever to delete all these tweets!” a user said.
While persistent tweets have long plagued users, through search engine caches and other archiving mechanismsthis issue seems to suggest that Twitter keeps deleted tweets for much longer than users would like.
The bug is just the latest in an extremely rocky start to Musk’s tenure, with the platform’s San Francisco headquarters under investigation for potential building code violations as well as numerous technical issues plaguing the social media site itself.
