Twitter has confirmed that two-factor authentication is still active on the service despite concerns that it was accidentally shut down or broken. A tweet from Twitter Support says the company is “investigating the few cases where SMS codes aren’t delivered,” but doesn’t give much indication of how many people are affected.
Monday a few tweet went viral on the platform featuring screenshots of error codes about how SMS codes failed to send, with some users linking the issues to CEO Elon Musk proverb that the platform would shut down unnecessary parts of Twitter’s infrastructure. However, our testing showed that the service wasn’t completely broken, and when we put out a public call to ask people if they’d been locked out, we only got a handful of responses. Most talked about not being able to pass the 2FA check required to request an archive of your Twitter data.
While Twitter’s official word on two-factor authentication may reassure some people who are worried they won’t be able to re-login to their accounts, I personally still find it hard to fully trust the platform to remain stable at this point. Several engineers at the company have accused Musk of not understanding the technical changes he wants to make to the company, and have reportedly been fired for doing so, even though they have privately voiced their concerns. Twitter has also lost or lost about half of its staff, thousands of contractors and executives responsible for things like information security and trust and safety.
While the tweets accusing Twitter of removing its two-factor authentication microservice don’t appear to be accurate, I have a feeling we could very well see some groundbreaking bugs popping up in the not-too-distant future if the company stays on course in this direction.