Deleted Twitter messages reappear for some users

Let’s say you deleted some Twitter messages. Perhaps they just wanted to get rid of some blunders. Maybe I should have tweeted something I regretted, or deleted a tweet that might get me in trouble with my boss. Well, you’d better check your Twitter feed. Messages that you thought were gone for a long time may reappear.

again: Twitter Rolls Out Direct Message Encryption, But Keys Are Limited

It was Richard “Dick” Morrell, an open source developer, security expert, and former CTO/Chairman who made me aware of this problem. smooth wallThe company, one of the world’s largest internet security companies, said: Mastodon:

I deleted all my tweets last November. One by one. Then I ran Redact to remove all likes, media and retweets. 38,000 tweets disappeared. … I woke up today to find 34,000 of them had been restored by Twitteryou probably backed up your server farm.

he wasn’t funny

And he was not alone. Morrell reported that more than 400 people have so far said they too have seen deleted messages restored. He estimates that more than 1 million of his previously deleted tweets, only for people in his circle, have resurfaced.

Specifically, tweets that were deleted before November 2022 are reportedly reappearing. Morrell speculated, “I’m pretty sure they restored cold storage because all the restored tweets have date and time signatures.”

again: Best Twitter Alternatives

A former Twitter Site Reliability Engineer with the online name “mx alex Tax1a” who worked on the core infrastructure provisioning automation team suggested: Moved a large number of servers between data centers and did not adjust the topology properly The old data will be revived before being reinserted into the network. ”

they added:

To do this, the storage guy would use a tool to take it out of the topology, erase the machine on our machine, move the machine around, and make it look as if it was a brand new machine in the new data. I’m assuming you want to reinstall. It is centered and *only afterwards* reinserted into the topology.

The return of messages once deleted “is what we would expect if they didn’t,” they continued.

again: I tried Bluesky Social, it’s basically a much friendlier Twitter

When asked about Twitter, the company responded with a poop emoji.Believe it or not, it’s now Elon Musk’s Favorable Response to Press Questions.

Morrell takes it more seriously. “This shows that Twitter has absolutely no control over data privacy on a global scale. It violates its terms.” GDPR Globally without defense. ”

Researcher Bene, who studies RNA and infectious diseases at the Humboldt University of Berlin, sums it all up nicely with a mastodon feed.Twitter is basically Hotel California now. You can checkout whenever you want, but you can’t leave a tweet. ”