@DeniseWakeman has been suspended and I have no idea why

UPDATE: It seems that as of about 8:00 p.m. my twitter account was restored as were most of the thousands of others that were "accidentally suspended" due to human error. That caused quite a commotion in the twittersphere!

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This afternoon, I was working on a project and was checking out a client's blog. When I tried to retweet one of her blog posts I saw an alarming notice on my @DeniseWakeman twitter profile:

What the ??? Only a few minutes before I had sent a tweet.

I immediately went to Twitter's support page and submitted a support ticket. I got an auto reply with the following info:

If you are suspended, it's most likely for one or more of these reasons::

User Abuse
* a large number of people block the profile or write in with spam complaints
* aggressive following
* imbalanced ratio: the number of followers is small compared to number of people following
* misuse of the reply feature
* updates consist of duplicate links and/or text
* updates consist mainly of links and not personal updates
* updates consist of updates poached from others' timelines, passed off as one's own

Technical Abuse
* updates consist of links pointing to phishing sites, malware, or other harmful material
* a large number of accounts is created in a short amount of time
* an account is identified as belonging to a spam cluster

When this happens, we suspend the account for investigation and hide the contents from the public view in order to remove the cause of complaint.

Looking at this list, the only thing I can see that may be a problem is that I post links to my blog posts on two different twitter accounts.

I guess I'll have to wait and see what happens. So, in the meantime, will you please follow me on my @BlogSquad account? I don't want to lose touch with my twitter friends!

Comments

[Denise Wakeman]

Just discovered that hundreds of legit twitter accounts have been suspended. Maybe twitter has been hacked?

[MariSmith.com]

Whew - this is unreal, eh Denise!!! I think you're right about the whole of Twitter being hacked... though more likely they thought they'd copy Facebook's tight spam algorithms and the system backfired!!

I panicked at first ... now am looking for the lesson, time to step away from the computer and enjoy what's left of Sunday. lol. I'm optimistic this'll be resolved asap. I'm waiting for Mashable to break something about it. This is Jesse's post: http://staynalive.com/articles/2009/07/05/twitter-suspending-accounts-in-droves/

[Brian Williams]

Hi Denise. What a bummer. I'll follow you on your other account. This kind of "shoot first ask questions later" policy almost makes it mandatory to build a second Twitter account for this reason. @brianwilliams

[Stacy Brice]

Denise...

I, too, was suspended. And I read the "rules" too, and had to wonder what I could have done to be suspended. Even wrote to them about it.

As I started hearing that others had been suspended (like you, Mari, and some other friends), I really had to start thinking that this wasn't something Twitter purposefully did to us...but it was something gone wrong.

Maybe it is as Mari thinks. Maybe someone hacked Twitter. Maybe it was an angry Twitter employee gone rogue. It could be any of a number of things, and I suspect we'll all hear about it soon enough (although, I suspect we'll hear from those who think it should have been even *sooner*--like as soon as they knew people were affected).

In the meantime, I'm no longer suspended, and I see you aren't, either. That's a very good thing. :)

[Andy Ebon]

Well, now at least I know it wasn't just me that was suspended.

I received a similar notice, at login, late afternoon on Sunday. I sent a couple of notes to Twitter support, and my account was live, Monday morning.

Never did get an information about why, specifically, mine was suspended.

Very annoying,

Andy
Twitter @andyebon