Twitter is Turning Off Its SMS Service Globally
It’s sad to say but Twitter has announced that it is turning off its Twitter via SMS service for the majority of its global users. Although this feature was not used by many people across the world, however, there are some users who will be affected by this recent change.
Last year, the social media giant has turned off the feature to tweet via text message after its CEO Jack Dorsey was hacked last year. Twitter used text messaging in its early days when people were allowed to send and receive messages through mobile text messages. However, with the advancing technology, a majority of people have moved from the traditional way to posting and reading tweets via the website, mobile apps, and desktop applications. And so, Twitter is no longer having this feature on their platform.
We want to continue to help keep your account safe. We’ve seen vulnerabilities with SMS, so we’ve turned off our Twitter via SMS service, except for a few countries.
Everyone will still have access to important SMS messages needed to log in to and manage their accounts.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) April 27, 2020
Some Twitter users with a large following may notice a drop in followers as high as 10 percent due to the removal of these SMS-created accounts. However, other than that, the changes appear to be minimal. These accounts were simply receiving tweets from users they signed up for SMS notifications for.
In this regard, Twitter informed some of its partners of the changes that occurred on April 16. Since most of the users using this service were set up many years ago, without an email or other contact information, the social media giant is unable to notify these users directly of the service changes.
“We are removing accounts that were created via SMS as we no longer support this technology and because these accounts have a high risk of becoming compromised,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement provided to Mashable. “As a result of this, some accounts may see a drop in followers. We want people to have confidence that their follower counts are meaningful, accurate and reflect active accounts on Twitter, and this is part of our ongoing work to ensure that.”
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