Twitter has many well documented reliability issues – but we still love it! The company has seen its service grow at an ever increasing rate, and has often struggled to keep up.
Fortunately, the current ‘follower problem’ seems to be hitting a relatively small number of users.
Unfortunately, one of them is ME!
The Twitter follower problem
The person with the problem is suddenly unable to follow anyone. They can send a follow request, which is received by the person they want to follow – but that’s it! The twitter user with the bug will not know they have it; until they start getting complaints or they check their follow numbers.
Complaints? Yes – Just imagine how it looks to people:
You get a follow request from Bob. You check Bob’s profile and decide to follow him back, only to find he’s immediately dumped you! Bob’s done nothing wrong of course – But twitter has screwed up and deleted his follow!
Who’s been hit?
At the moment, the problem seems to be hitting twitter users; who have BOTH large follower numbers, AND large following numbers.
These include:
@mrtweet: The Mr Tweet recommendation service was hit during December and again twice this month; for a total of 18 days (so far!)
@zappos: The Zappos.com twitter account had the bug for five days.
@scobleizer: Robert Scoble’s twitter account joined the list this morning.
@jimconnolly: Yep, mine lasted for 5 days.
Have you had this problem? If so, please let me know!
I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s more widespread than the dozen or so accounts I know of.
Related posts:
This problem is caused by the inability of twitter to grow or scale their tech to keep up with all the new users. There’s negative posts springing up all over. I closed my account just before Christmas because it was getting so much spam and was too unreliable.
The reason it takes twitter five days to fix these follower problems, is that they are currently putting out fires and the fires are gaining ground. Theres no way they would leave high profile users, with large networks so unhappy unless they had to.
The only thing that can stop twitter right now is twitter itself.
I have a different follow problem, I’ve now submitted four tech support requests, none of which have been addressed. First, I was receiving emails with follow requests but when I clicked through to twitter, the requests weren’t on my profile. Then they started appearing on my profile but when I clicked ‘accept’ the screen simply refreshed itself, the request was still sitting there and the follower hadn’t been added to my list. And in the meantime, two users have dropped off my followers list. Very annoying and I’m now thinking of closing my account. If such a basic aspect of twitter functionality doesn’t work over a matter of weeks, what’s the point? Lots more to do online…
Its driving me mad. I have the follow back problem too. Each time I click to follow back all seems good ” now following” until I either refresh or return to the following page and all the people I had just followed are showing up as follow again .. I hate to think what’s happening their end they must think I’m mad following them and then not following and then following…..
Yes, I am facing such a problem for more than a week. The issue I am not able to get none of my followers update & also not able to see who are all following me.
It jus posts the updates of mine alone & i havent got any updates from my followers list.
It really taking its own sweet time & till now nothing is resolved except that, twitter has said such a problem exits & to await till it gets resolved.
We are having the same issues. It seems that the account is losing followers because of it and we are unable to direct message to reply to users.