Twitter fail leads to brief account ban for CEO Jack Dorsey

23 Nov 2016

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter. Image: JD Lasica/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

In what looked like a shock removal of CEO Jack Dorsey from Twitter, the company that he runs, the reality turns out to be far more embarrassing for the social network’s engineers.

It hasn’t been a good few months for Twitter and Jack Dorsey, as the site continues to find a possible buyer to ease its financial woes, despite it being regularly cited as one of the biggest sources of information online.

In another unfortunate bit of bad press, Dorsey – once ousted from the company’s leadership only to return in late 2015 – suddenly found on Tuesday (22 November) that his Twitter account had disappeared.

‘An internal mistake’

Unsurprisingly, speculation as to the reason for the account’s disappearance resulted in a lot of chatter online, with rumours that Dorsey had been removed from his position.

According to CNN, once the error had been spotted, Twitter’s engineers scrambled to get Dorsey’s handle @jack back online, but once it had, a number of issues began to pop up.

Most noticeable was the slight decline in followers from close to 4m prior to the deletion, but less than 200 immediately after.

Dorsey himself did respond with a tweet after his account returned, referencing back to his first ever tweet by saying “just setting up my twttr … again”, before going on to give the explanation that it was “an internal mistake”.

Understandably, reaction has been mixed. The wider Twitter community have come to their own conclusions as to what happened, with some suggesting a hack orchestrated by Russia or a hacker group.

As of now, his account appears to have returned to normal.

The news of an internal error is likely to stoke more questions around the corporate health of Twitter, particularly after it announced in October it was going to lay off hundreds of staff in its global operations.

Jack Dorsey, CEO, Twitter. Image: JD Lasica/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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