Twitter Account Suspensions
Sunday, July 5th, 2009: A lot of people with legitimate Twitter accounts are currently suffering from having their accounts suspended (late Sunday afternoon).
It is not TweetLater?s doing or fault. So, please do not submit a TweetLater support request about it.
We just heard back from Twitter via email, and they said : ?
Spamcloud hit. We?re working on restoring accounts.?
We just need to be patient. The suspended accounts will be restored.
Update: We have no idea exactly what a ?spam cloud? means. It is probably Twitter staff lingo for a massive spam attack.
Update: We have seen during previous spam attacks that Twitter tends to shoot first and ask questions later and indiscriminately lay down carpet bombing when their system comes under a spam attack. A lot of innocent-bystander accounts get massacred in the process, which they then have to restore afterwards. This is most likely what has happened again.
Update: We have no idea how long it will take Twitter to restore the wrongly suspended accounts. We do not have insight into that information.
Update: Twitter has now
posted an update about the suspensions on their status blog.
Earlier today, we accidentally suspended a number of accounts.
We regret the human error that led to these mistaken suspensions and we are working to restore the affected accounts?we expect this to be completed in the next several hours.
One additional note: some the accounts suspended were using the third-party site Tweetlater. However, Tweetlater is not to blame for these suspensions nor is it in violation of our Terms.