paidContent - Twitter Accidentally Disables Accounts
This story was written by Joseph Tartakoff.
To add to the legend of Twitter’s service problems: The day the microblogging site accidentally suspended some users’ accounts. After multiple reports on Twitter and elsewhere that accounts had been suspended for seemingly no reason, Twitter acknowledged the problem on its status page late Sunday evening (via Mashable): “We regret the human error that led to these mistaken suspensions and we are working to restore the affected accountswe expect this to be completed in the next several hours.”
Twitter did not say how many accounts were affected—although a Twitter Search for “suspended” is loaded with users wondering why accounts they follow—ranging from Seattle TV station King5 to that of the musician Bjork—are disabled (See above for a screenshot of Bjork’s account). Real-time blog Stay N’ Alive says it could be in the “hundreds to thousands.” As Twitter promised, suspended accounts were being put back online, including one we follow with 6,000 followers which had earlier been pulled. Certainly, however, the issue won’t help Twitter’s reputation for being notoriously unstable. We’ll update if we learn more.
By Joseph Tartakoff