Twitter bug sees deleted tweets resurrected for some users

There’s an issue with Twitter that’s popped up for users recently around deleted tweets not staying deleted. While it’s not clear how widespread the bug is at this point, it might be worth double-checking your Twitter account if you’ve deleted tweets or retweets that you were expecting to remain that way.

Two weeks ago, James Vincent at The Verge deleted all of his tweets. But today, he “discovered that Twitter has restored a handful of my old re-tweets; interactions I know I scrubbed from my profile…” with some of the retweets dating back to 2020.

Looking into the situation further, Vincent noticed he’s not the only one seeing the Twitter bug. And others have seen tens of thousands of tweets resurrected after deleting them.

Last week, Dick Morrell shared on Mastodon that he’s seen 34,000 tweets come back out of 38,000 that he deleted:

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

For six months I’ve had sub 5 tweets online

Woke up today to find 34k of them restored.by Twitter who presumably brought a server farm back up.

Now re deleting

This shows why you should NOT be using Twitter, ever

Please boost

Addendum: if you are affected please follow me here and post details of your experience.

Am in touch with Twitter.

Vincent notes it’s hard to know how widespread the issue is or what’s causing it. Colleagues at The Verge revealed were hit and miss who saw the trouble, but Morrell who saw 34,000 tweets return recently told ZDNET that 400 people have reached out to him about seeing the bug.

Vincent reached out to Twitter about the situation but just got back an auto-reply with “💩.”

Two possibilities for what could be causing the problem include a bug with how third-party tools work that allows Twitter users to delete tweets and it also could be a server issue at Twitter. Interestingly, Vincent and Morrell used different bulk delete tools.

Have you seen or are you seeing deleted tweets or retweets reappear? Share your experience in the comments!