Losing Twitter followers? It’s not you, it’s Twitter

We’ve gotten multiple reports that users of the micro-messaging service Twitter have lost significant amounts of followers over the past few days. One of our own writers noticed this as well and wondered if his political tweets (Twitter messages) were driving people away. Others are wondering if they are sleep-tweeting (you know, like sleep-walking) awful messages.

While you might be saying inappropriate things, that probably isn’t driving people away.

A scan of the excellent Twitter search site Summize shows a large amount of people tweeting about lost followers over the past few days. No one knows for sure what is going on but a few have keyed in on the idea that Twitter may simply be deleting the accounts of users it marked as spammers.

We contacted Twitter on the issue yesterday, and while co-founder Biz Stone said he wasn’t aware of any issue, he assured us that they were looking into it. It might seem odd that Stone wouldn’t know if Twitter was deleting spam or inactive accounts, but the company did just hire Pivotal Labs to help solve its woes. Those guys weren’t supposed to start until Monday, but perhaps they’re diving right in to help save the service many of us have come to rely on for communication.

The Twitter Status Blog, which Twitter has been great about updating following its serious downtime issues last month, has no word on this latest issue yet.

So for all of you Twitter addicts out there on the brink of losing your minds along with your followers, fear not. It could just be that Twitter is cleaning house of some of its spammers. Unfortunately, we can’t rule out data corruption/loss yet either. We’ll update when Twitter gets back to us.

You can find me on Twitter here along with fellow VentureBeat writers Eric Eldon, Dean Takahashi, Anthony Ha and Chris Morrison. Oh, and we have a VentureBeat account (for our posts) as well.

[image: twitter/dominiccampbell]