Another day, another nail in the burning coffin of this collapsing website.
Magic Trick
A warning to the wise: a new Twitter glitch is apparently resurfacing and restoring deleted tweets and un-retweeted retweets.
Vincent isn’t the one who seems to be having this issue, pointing to a Mastodon toot from open-source developer Dick Morrell detailing a similar ordeal.
“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,” Morrell tooted on May 17. “For six months I’ve had sub 5 tweets online.”
“Woke up today to find 34k of them restored by Twitter,” Morrell continued, speculating that Twitter had “presumably brought a server farm back up.”
It’s unclear how widespread the issue was, though Morrell later told ZDNet that at least 400 people had responded to him saying that they were experiencing a similar issue.
Alas. Another day, another nail in the burning coffin of this collapsing, deeply broken Elon Musk vanity project.
Servers Up, Service Down
A Mastodon user going by the handle “mx alex tax1a,” who according to ZDNet‘s reporting is a former Twitter Site Reliability Engineer who worked on the social media platform’s “core infrastructure provisioning automation team,” took to Morrell’s replies to agree with the developer’s server thesis.
“As an ex-twitter employee,” they wrote, “this 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, leading to stale data becoming revived.”
Of course, there are numerous reasons why someone might want to delete old tweets. Some, like Vincent, have deleted tweets because they don’t want to further access to be used to train machine learning systems. Some users may want to delete potentially problematic content, while other folks out there might be embarrassed by whoever they might have been circa 2011-2013 and want to delete any digital trace of said cringe-inducing self.
But whatever your reason for choosing to scrub a social account might be, the fact still stands that you should just be able to do so reliably. This glitch sucks, and in the words of a very perturbed Morrell: “Now re-deleting. This shows why you should NOT be using Twitter, ever.”
More on other Twitter issues: Elon Musk Obediently Censors Twitter When Dictator Tells Him To