Lost Your Tweets? You’re Not Alone

Missing some of your tweets? Yeah, you’re not going crazy. Others appear to be missing them, as well, and Twitter confirms there’s a temporary problem.

Earlier today, Jill Whalen — one of the moderators at our sister-site Sphinn — noticed that our Sphinn account only had three tweets when she looked at it, all from 2008! Currently, two new ones done today have been added, then everything is still missing until back to May 2008:

I figured this was some odd problem just with us. But about a half hour ago, I was over at Leo Laporte’s account today, to catch up on the exchange he’s been having (that’s making me very jealous) with actor/musician/younameit Steve Martin. Turns out, he was having the same issue:

See how his first two tweets are for today (and talking about the problem), then after that, he’s back to 2008?

Doing a search for lost tweets and tweets 2008, I can see other people reporting the problem, things like:

You know I think some of my tweets were lost in the #newtwitter changeover. Where’d you end up?

Is the #newtwitter stable or not? Lost all the #tweets in my “Home”.

About 40% of my tweets have been permanently lost by Twitter. I quit.

Twitter seems to have “lost” 2 years tweets for some users. All tweets since Sept 12 2008.

Anyone at Twitter know why all my tweets since September 12, 2008 are gone? Feels like two years of my life have vanished

Earlier today, Twitter lost the ability for people to actually post tweets for about 15 minutes, as it posted about on the Twitter Status blog. So far, there’s no update about this other problem, which has been going on since at least 11:30am Pacific time today. I’ve got a message out to Twitter and will update, if I hear more.

In the meantime, don’t panic that your tweets are permanently lost. They almost certainly aren’t. Rather, this is a problem with Twitter displaying them on profile pages.

Twitter also announced new changes to its Twitter search engine yesterday, but today’s issue shouldn’t be related to that. While the announcement was yesterday, the changes happened over the past few weeks.

Twitter Hits 1 Billion Queries Per Day, Announces New Search Tech is our article with more about the new search engine, and it also covers how to find old tweets in other ways, outside of Twitter.

Postscript: I’ve now heard from Twitter, which tells me:

We are aware of the issue and working on a fix.

Tweets aren’t lost or deleted. They just aren’t displaying correctly.