Twitter user Timrasett discovered and demonstrated a flaw in the system that allowed him to post a single 35,000 character Tweet. Most of the message was simply nonsense, but it provided a simple method to overcome Twitter’s 140 (or 280 if you’re special) character limit.
The key to the absurdly long Tweet was the formatting. Timrasett, and his partner in crime who goes by the handle HackneyYT, set up the message to look like a URL. Nobody knows why Twitter’s automatic URL shortener failed to kick in and stop the nonsense. All that we know is someone managed to create a wall of random text on Twitter as a proof of concept.
It goes without saying that the offending Tweet was rapidly deleted, and both users banned for their little stunt. Timrasett and HackneyYT have since had their accounts restored, and have apologised for breaking the micro-blogging site.
Twitter has updated its system to prevent this from happening, although it hasn’t actually shed any light on what went wrong. Still, the company is reminding everyone that they are not allowed to disrupt the user experience of the site; which includes overloading, flooding, or spamming messages.
[Source: Gizmodo]
