NEW YORK: As Twitter tests new 280-character tweets, two Germans exploited a loophole in the popular social network site and sent a massive 35,000-character tweet, breaking the existing limit.
Timrasett along with another user going by name HackneyYT broke Twitter's character limit with a message that begins "People! @Timrasett and @HackneyYT can exceed the character limit! You do not believe us? HereÂ’s about 35k characters proof." After that, thousands of characters of seeming nonsense appear, tech website Gizmodo reported.
At least part of the trick was that the nonsense was formatted as a URL.
It is not yet clear how this method got past Twitter’s automatic link shortening tools, but the tweet was treated just the same as if it were sending out a standard, reasonably-sized URL.
Both users were briefly suspended and the tweet was deleted.
A spokesperson for Twitter confirmed that the company has made changes to prevent this from happening again.
Twitter recently announced a test project allowing tweets to be expanded to 280 characters—double the existing limit.
San Francisco-based Twitter said the new system, a major shift for the messaging platform known for its 140-character tweets, aims to address “a major cause of frustration” for many users.
A small group of users will see the new limits before Twitter decides on rolling out the changes more broadly.
Currently, the 280-character tweet facility is available to a small group of its 328 million users but the changes would soon be available for all users.