Twitter explains Deletions issue

Today, Twitter offered an explanation of the Deletions issues a number of Twitter users have been experiencing: Updates on deletions

Status deletion has been re-enabled.

User restoration has also been re-enabled.

User deletion remains off as it still represents a significant problem for the stability of the service. In the past several months, we’ve had to turn off user deletion many times in order to keep things running smoothly. Each time we turned it back on, we’d hoped we had sufficiently patched the existing system to prevent it from being a problem.

We’ve now concluded that the user deletion system needs to be rewritten and we’ve started that effort. Until we finish, user deletion will remain off. There’s a number of places throughout the site where we will need to message this better. We’ll be making those changes as well.

Certainly, this is a concerning issue, only one of which plagues the frequent twitter users in the tweetosphere.   Without any knowledge of exactly how they’re handling the routines for handling user deletion, aging, and load experienced on the system I could only offer the briefest of a question of how it is being addressed with suggestions.

We’ll see if the Tweetosphere continues to suffer from Performance issues such as this, and the frequent Site Outages experienced throughout the week.  Always raising the question and concern of have they properly accounted for the scale of this volume and the user communities peaks and valleys for system load.

I’ll keep my eye on it, but here is your word from the Twitter itself! @cxi – Christopher Kusek