NEW DELHI: As Twitter users across the world rejoiced at the new 280-character limit, two Germans made use of a loophole on the microblogging site to post a tweet with as many as 35,000 characters, reported Gizmodo, a tech blog.
The duo's now deleted tweet (translated from German) read: "People! @Timrasett and @HackneyYT can exceed the character limit! You do not believe us? Here's about 35k characters proof." (The tweet was then followed by a string of 35,000 random characters.) They posted it on Saturday.
A copy of the deleted tweet can be accessed on internet archives.
Twitter also briefly suspended the account of the German users. However, the accounts were reinstated after the duo apologised.
It is still not exactly clear how they managed to breach the character limit of Twitter. According to Gizmodo, the tweet was possibly formatted as a url, containing the code ".cc/tsyau" somewhere in the tweet body, which allowed circumvention of Twitter's character limit restriction. The Germans also managed to bypass Twitter's automatic link shortening tools.
Both the Twitter users plan to continue with their exploits and try and trace more bugs on the social media platform.
Meanwhile, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo that the company has made changes to fix the bug.
For those who don't want to be restricted to 140 characters, Twitter, starting today, allows 280-character tweets. For India and the Indian diaspora, the update will apply to the six regional languages supported on the platform - Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi and Tamil, Twitter said, according to PTI.
Japanese, Korean, and Chinese will continue to have 140 characters because cramming is not an issue in these languages, Twitter said in a blogpost.
In September, Twitter launched a test that expanded the 140-character limit for tweets.
"Twitter saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often," said Twitter Product Manager Aliza Rosen in the blogpost.
She added that Twitter is making this change after listening and observing a problem its global community was facing in terms of tweeting.
Twitter had 330 million monthly users at the end of September 2017 quarter. It does not divulge country-specific numbers.
(With inputs from PTI)
The duo's now deleted tweet (translated from German) read: "People! @Timrasett and @HackneyYT can exceed the character limit! You do not believe us? Here's about 35k characters proof." (The tweet was then followed by a string of 35,000 random characters.) They posted it on Saturday.
A copy of the deleted tweet can be accessed on internet archives.
Twitter also briefly suspended the account of the German users. However, the accounts were reinstated after the duo apologised.
Hey! Sorry for the crashes. We just wanted to show that Twitter is easy to crack.
— Timrasett 🅥 (@Timrasett)
1509886844000
It is still not exactly clear how they managed to breach the character limit of Twitter. According to Gizmodo, the tweet was possibly formatted as a url, containing the code ".cc/tsyau" somewhere in the tweet body, which allowed circumvention of Twitter's character limit restriction. The Germans also managed to bypass Twitter's automatic link shortening tools.
Both the Twitter users plan to continue with their exploits and try and trace more bugs on the social media platform.
We are still trying to find bugs on Twitter. The 35,000 characters were just the beginning!
— Hackney 🅥 (@HackneyYT)
1509901549000
Meanwhile, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed to Gizmodo that the company has made changes to fix the bug.
For those who don't want to be restricted to 140 characters, Twitter, starting today, allows 280-character tweets. For India and the Indian diaspora, the update will apply to the six regional languages supported on the platform - Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi and Tamil, Twitter said, according to PTI.
Japanese, Korean, and Chinese will continue to have 140 characters because cramming is not an issue in these languages, Twitter said in a blogpost.
In September, Twitter launched a test that expanded the 140-character limit for tweets.
"Twitter saw when people needed to use more than 140 characters, they Tweeted more easily and more often," said Twitter Product Manager Aliza Rosen in the blogpost.
She added that Twitter is making this change after listening and observing a problem its global community was facing in terms of tweeting.
Twitter had 330 million monthly users at the end of September 2017 quarter. It does not divulge country-specific numbers.
(With inputs from PTI)
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