Something at Twitter has gone horribly, hilariously wrong: The social media site has unceremoniously declared us all to be robots. Well, maybe not all of us, but more than a few folks on Gizmodo staff as well as dozens of users across the web. Affected users trying to Tweet from Twitter’s web client are being told their messages “look automated”, and have been blocked to protect other users from “spam and malicious activity”.
Pretty harsh, considering all this dude wants to do is talk about Better Call Saul:
Just here trying to compliment E2 of Better Call Saul but Twitter thinks I’m a robot spamming the TL.
— Gurvinder (@RobbieDhesi) February 10, 2015
Or poor @kittysaysmoo, who suddenly lost her ability to decipher random letters and numbers:
twitter is blocking my tweets because it thinks I’m a robot?? *suddenly can’t solve captchas* oh noooooo
— Bret Sepulveda (@kittysaysmoo) February 10, 2015
Others have taken the sudden transformation as an opportunity to learn a new language:
Apparently Twitter thinks I’m a robot. Going forward I will only tweet in binary.
— Nate Kiernan (@MrNinjaSquirrel) February 10, 2015
Some folks are looking on the bright side:
Oh, I don’t mind if Twitter thinks I’m a bot! I mean, I WANT to become a cyborg, I’m one step closer to my goal! @savannidgerinel
— Kathryn Long (@StarKat99) February 11, 2015
But mostly, people are just confused:
Twitter thinks I’m a robot. It keeps stopping all my tweets. Let’s see if this goes through. #NotABot
— Mallory C. Brown (@MalloryCBrown) February 10, 2015
I haven’t been able to tweet for like 6 hours because I guess twitter thinks I’m a robot now?? so that’s cool pic.twitter.com/Bs1BPv7KiN
— Haley (@astral_cars) February 10, 2015
Apparently Twitter thinks I’m a robot and just locked my account. Cheers for that! Really enjoyed faffing around with that
Twitter thinks I’m a robot and won’t let me post. This is a text from my phone, so hopefully it works?
— Alexander Dunn (@AxeloftheKey) February 10, 2015
I can only tweet from phone because twitter thinks I’m a robot
— Jill_M (@Cinkero) February 10, 2015
web twitter thinks I’m a bot and won’t let me tweet, this explains a lot of things
— success bear (@piss_wizard) February 10, 2015
At least it can be fixed:
I just had to go through a whole process to unlock my account because @twitter thinks I’m an auto-tweet bot. Thanks. pic.twitter.com/WnQGMKmiYM
— Elvish Princess. (@MaybeBeth) February 10, 2015
Most of these tweets have popped up over the last hour, and we’re not entirely sure what’s going out. We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment, and it’s already posted that it’s aware of the issue. We’ll let you know if we hear anything more.
Update: Well, that was quick: Twitter has updated its status page to say that it has resolved the issue:
[ Update 16:21 PST ]
Between 15:18 and 16:11 PST today, some users were unable to Tweet and received a notice telling them they have been locked out.
This issue has now been fully resolved. We apologise for any inconvenience caused by this.