Twitter Accounts Suspended – Gov 2.0 Expo Related?
UPDATE Sept 9th, 9:35am: My personal account @DanielleMorrill looks like it is up again, I just sent a test tweet to see. Right now my following/follower counts are both zeros and while I hope they’ll remove any cruft from those lists (I’ve noticed a lot of latency with updating my relationships) I definitely hope I don’t have to rebuild my network entirely.
UPDATE Sept 9th, 9:25am: It appears this has impacted a lot of other people as well, and TechCrunch is reporting that suspensions may be related to tweets about the Gov 2.0 Expo: read the full story here… and now there are rumors that it may take as many as 30 days to reinstate accounts.
About an hour ago I logged onto Twitter, or tried, only to find that my personal accounts and the account for my company were suspended. I quickly checked Twitter search to make sure no tweets had been sent from those account that I didn’t know about (which you might expect if the accounts were hacked) and also checked Google Reader since I figured they might have already removed any offending content from the public timeline. I found nothing, and sent requests to Twitter for each of the accounts to be unsuspended.
Now Twitter itself appears to be down, and not just with the “Fail Whale” but with a real 503 error, which I asked a friend about that explained that error is often served by a load balancer when the load is more than the server can bear. Sounds like a potential DDoS attack.
So, I’m glad in a way that our accounts are suspended because I wouldn’t want any spam coming out of them — but this has me reflecting on just how dependent I’ve become on Twitter and Twitter search to feel connected to my network. Ironically, just tonight I posted on Facebook that I’d decided to delete Whrrl from my phone and return to the Facebook community. Hopefully this is just a temporary hiccup and Twitter will have things figured out in the morning, I don’t envy them the task of dealing with this and frustrated customers (like me).