Thousands of deleted tweets reappear on Twitter: Here's what happened
Unpredictability has been a common characteristic of Elon Musk's Twitter. From random outages to arbitrarily deleting tweets of certain users, there have been several examples of the platform's buggy nature. The latest issue is the reappearance of deleted tweets. Some users are reporting the restoration of thousands of tweets they once deleted en masse. Twitter is yet to confirm or deny this development.
Why does this story matter?
Twitter has never been the epitome of a flawless social media platform. However, the microblogging platform's infrastructure has taken a huge hit since Musk's takeover. Platforms do face outages and other bugs but if a user is unable to delete a tweet without fearing its reappearance, the company is failing in one of its basic responsibilities.
A user complained about 34,000 tweets getting restored
On May 17, a user complained on Mastodon about 34,000 of his deleted tweets getting restored. "Last November I deleted all my Tweets. Every single one. I then ran Redact and deleted all my likes, my media and retweets," said open-source developer Richard Morrell. "Woke up today to find 34k of them restored by Twitter, who presumably brought a server farm back up."
It is unclear how widespread the issue is
Morrell wasn't the only person who faced this issue. According to him, over 400 people told him about deleted tweets reappearing. The Verge's senior tech reporter James Vincent also experienced the same. He deleted around 5,000 tweets on May 8. However, a "handful" of them were restored by Twitter today morning. It is unclear how widespread the issue is.
Twitter could have moved servers between data centers
Twitter has not said anything about the reason behind the problem. It could be due to the third-party tools used by affected Twitter users. However, there are various apps that people depend on for this purpose. According to a former Twitter site reliability engineer, the issue might be a result of the company "moving a bunch of servers between data centers."
'Twitter is in violation of privacy norms'
Deleted tweets getting automatically restored without users' knowledge is a violation of what the company promises. "This shows Twitter has no handle at all on data privacy globally. It is in breach of GDPR on a global scale without a defense," said Morrell, who is also a security expert. Twitter may have to come up with some explanation about what transpired.
