Users are reporting that Twitter is unexpectedly restoring deleted tweets and retweets. It’s not yet known what is causing the issue.
Reports are starting to come out as users are discovering that old tweets and retweets thought to have been deleted are appearing once more. Without any notice or reasoning, Twitter users such as The Verge’s James Vincent states that a handful of previously deleted tweets have returned.
Vincent says that this year, he deleted roughly 5,000 tweets at the beginning of the month. Much to his surprise, he woke up this week to see many have surfaced one more. In a report, he recounts some of the retweets and videos dating back to 2020. His story paints a pretty strong picture that the bug is able to cause data from over three years ago to return.
Alongside Vincent, open-source developer Dick Morrell is also experiencing a similar issue. Morrell claims that he deleted all his 38,000 tweets in November of last year. However, on May 17th, he discovered that 34,000 of them had been restored. Morrell reached out to Twitter to see if an explanation could be given.
As of now, there’s no conclusive reasoning behind what may be causing the issue. Some believe that Twitter may have accidentally caused a server to fire up the old data. Others believe it may have something to do with the tools used to delete said tweets. Online tools such as TweetDelete and Redcact can be used to delete tweets en masse.
It’s difficult to gauge how widespread the bug is currently. However, this appears to be another example of Twitter running amok. This month alone, users reported that a security flaw temporarily exposed private ‘Circle’ tweets. These tweets were designed to only be viewable to those the user selected. Though, an issue caused them to become public. Additionally, following Musk’s decision to remove legacy verified checkmarks, a bug momentarily brought them back.
Twitter has yet to address the issue. Of course, reaching out to their press inquiry email would only result in an automated reply of the poop emoji. For now, it may be best to glance over your feed and see if an old, deleted tweet has returned.
Source: The Verge
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