Twitter is apparently restoring deleted tweets for several of its users, media reports say. According to a report by The Verge, several Twitter users have been reporting that tweets they mass-deleted have been restored to their profiles.
"It’s another example of Twitter’s unpredictable behaviour under Elon Musk", the report added.
As per The Verge journalist James Vincent, some of the old and deleted tweets date back to 2020. "The re-tweets themselves are completely run-of-the-mill. There’s a video of kids cheering a construction worker. A Sopranos meme about Lindy (remember Lindy?). But the oldest dates back to 2020 — a video from the George Floyd protests that I would have shared while they were happening," Vincent wrote.
However, there is no acknowledgement from Twitter as to why three-year-old tweets are being restored on their own.
Why on Earth is Twitter restoring three-year-old information? And what does it say about the ability of the platform’s users to control their own data? Nothing good, obviously, The Verge report noted.
According a report by ZDNet, Richard "Dick" Morrell, open-source developer, security expert, and former CTO/Chairman of SmoothWall, the global internet security powerhouse, posted on Mastodon: "Last November, I deleted all my Tweets. Every single one. I then ran Redact and deleted all my likes, my media, and retweets. 38k tweets gone. … Woke up today to find 34k of them restored by Twitter, who presumably brought a server farm back up."
He also mentioned that over 400 people had told him so far that they, too, had seen their deleted messages restored. He also estimated that over a million previously deleted Tweets with just the people in his circles have reappeared. Specifically, people report they're seeing deleted tweets from November 2022 and earlier reappearing.
"I am pretty sure they've restored cold storage because all the restored tweets have date-time characteristics," said Morell.
According to a former Twitter site reliability engineer, "This sounds a lot like they moved a bunch of servers between data centers and didn't properly adjust the topology before reinserting them into the network, leading to stale data becoming revived."