Twitter bug restoring deleted tweets for hundreds of clueless users

IANS

New Delhi, May 22

A bug in Twitter is apparently restoring deleted tweets and retweets for hundreds of users who have no clue about it and the micro-blogging platform was yet to admit the issue and issue a fix, the media reported on Monday.

Users are reporting that tweets they mass-deleted are reappearing on their profiles, reports The Verge.

James Vincent, a senior Verge reporter, wrote that earlier this month, he deleted all his tweets, just under 5,000 of them, but can now see Twitter has restored a handful of old re-tweets.

"On May 8th, I deleted my tweets (I know the date because I tweeted about it). but when I checked my timeline this morning, twitter had restored some old re-tweets without warning. it's yet another illustration of twitter's unpredictable infrastructure," he said in a tweet.

Richard Morrell, open-source developer and former CTO/Chairman of SmoothWall, shared the same problem on Mastodon.

"Last November, I deleted all my Tweets. Every single one. I then ran Redact and deleted all my likes, my media, and retweets. 38k tweets gone. Woke up today to find 34k of them restored by Twitter, who presumably brought a server farm back up," he posted.

Morrell reported that over 400 people had told him so far that they, too, had seen their deleted messages restored, reports ZDNet.

He estimated that over a million previously deleted Tweets with just the people in his circles have reappeared.

Specifically, people report they're seeing deleted tweets from November 2022 and earlier reappearing.

"I am pretty sure they've restored cold storage because all the restored tweets have date-time characteristics," said Morell.

Twitter was yet to issue an explanation for such claims.

According to a former Twitter site reliability engineer, "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."  

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