Twitter publishes deleted tweets and retweets: is it a simple bug?

Certainly, Twitter can be plagued by sometimes strange bugs. Several users of the platform noticed that the tweets they had deleted had reappeared.

The issue was first raised by Richard Morrell, open source software developer, security expert and former CTO of Smoothwall, the global online security giant.

A potential server problem

In a post on Mastodon, Morrell explains: “ Last November, I deleted all my tweets. All. I then launched Redact and deleted all my likes, media and retweets. 38,000 tweets disappeared. I woke up today to find that 34,000 of them had been restored by Twitter. »

This is not an isolated case. Morrell says more than 400 people informed him of a similar situation. He estimates that more than 1 million previously deleted tweets have reappeared from people around him.

A former Twitter engineer assumes that the platform’s teams ” moved a bunch of servers between data centers and didn’t properly adjust the topology before re-inserting them into the network, leading to reactivation of stale data “.

A bad step for an already badly tarnished reputation

This new inconvenience, which can have disastrous consequences for some users, demonstrates the limits of Twitter’s infrastructure. The platform has been plagued with such issues for many years, but they have escalated since Elon Musk’s $44 billion takeover. In particular, the numerous waves of massive layoffs brought by the billionaire, who drastically reduced the workforce of the social network.

It is also a very bad publicity stunt for the platform from the point of view of the management of users’ personal data. “ This shows that Twitter has no control over data privacy on a global scale. The platform violates GDPR globally “protests Morrell.

Contacted by media about this, Twitter responded with its now traditional poo emoji.

Sources: Mastodon, The Verge, ZDNet