14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter may have risen to its current level of popularity in the past few months but it has actually been around for three years now. And for the most part of those three years it has been notoriously buggy and unstable. Part of the Twitter charm for some, the problems have started to become less frequent recently but they haven't gone away entirely, as yesterday's debacle showed when possibly hundreds of thousands of accounts were suspended.
Reports started popping up that a large number of accounts were being automatically suspended though most of them were legitimate ones with no suspicious activities. Even some big, popular accounts with tens of thousands of followers were affected, like LA Times' @latimestot or that of Icelandic musician Bjork, @Bjork, which was still unavailable at the time of writing. Common reasons for account suspension are a number of suspicious activities like following a great number of people in a short amount of time, following and unfollowing users frequently or outright spam; however, this was not the case for the vast majority of the accounts disabled.
Filing a ticket for Twitter support apparently failed to solve anything at the time; however, Twitter responded yesterday evening and accounted the problems to human error. “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,” the Twitter status report said.
Some of the problems were for users of Tweetlater, whose account also got suspended, but Twitter has stated that the third-party service wasn't involved in any way. “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.”