Twitter bug resurrects deleted Tweets for numerous users, sparking confusion

Himanshu swaraj Tuesday, 23 May 2023 06:37:37 PM

Twitter bug resurrects deleted Tweets for numerous users, sparking confusion (Image: pixabay.com)

Delhi : The media reported on Monday that a flaw in Twitter appears to be restoring deleted tweets and retweets for hundreds of users who are unaware of it. Twitter has not yet acknowledged the problem or provided a cure for it. Tweets that users bulk erased are reportedly resurfacing on their accounts.

Earlier this month, James Vincent, a senior correspondent for the Verge, erased all of his tweets—a little under 5,000 of them—but he can now see that Twitter has reinstated a few of his previous retweets.

"On May 8th (I know the date because I tweeted about it), I erased my tweets. But when I checked my timeline this morning, several previous retweets had mysteriously been reinstated by Twitter. It serves as another evidence of Twitter's erratic infrastructure.

The issue was discussed on Mastodon by open-source developer and former SmoothWall CTO/Chairman Richard Morrell. "I erased every tweet I ever sent in November. Each and every one. After that, I used Redact to remove all of my likes, media, and retweets. 38k tweets were deleted. A server farm was probably brought back up by Twitter when I woke up this morning to discover 34k of them restored, he said in his message. Morrell said that over 400 people have so far shared with him their experiences of having their deleted communications returned.

He calculated that more than a million deleted Tweets that just included the individuals in his circles had now surfaced. People claim to have noticed deleted tweets from November 2022 and earlier reappearing in particular. All of the recovered tweets had date-time properties, so I'm quite sure they came from cold storage, Morell said.

Twitter had not yet provided an explanation for these allegations.

A former Twitter site reliability engineer stated that "this sounds a lot like they moved a bunch of servers between datacenters and didn't properly adjust the topology before reinserting them into the network, leading to stale data becoming revived."