Multiple Twitter users are reporting that deleted tweets are reappearing on the site at an alarming rate, with one security expert noting that the social media app restored a whopping 34,000 messages, as reported by ZDNET. The bug also seems to be impacting deleted retweets.
The issue appears to be widespread, but all of the data’s anecdotal. It seems to mostly impact those who batch-deleted tweets via a third-party service like Redact or TweetDelete, though not always. In any event, check your feed for the reappearance of that tasteless Harambe tweet you wrote and then deleted back in 2016.
This is a trivial issue for many, but does speak to how the company handles and protects your private data. A former Twitter Site Reliability Engineer suggested on Mastodon that it “sounds a lot like they moved a bunch of servers between data centers and didn’t properly adjust the topology before reinserting them into the network.” There’s no way to find out anything official because Elon Musk disbanded the press team, replacing the press line with a bot that returns only poop emojis. In any event, we’ll update this story if the company issues a statement of any kind that addresses the issue.
This has been a bizarre few months for the social media platform. The city of San Francisco launched a probe into potential building code violations and the site’s been plagued with technical issues. All of this has led to a stark decline in usage numbers, with competitors waiting in the wings to scoop up those fleeing the service.
