two weeks later Due to Twitter’s extreme chaos, users joined and fled the site in droves. On a quieter note, many people may scrutinize their accounts, check their security settings, and download their data. But some users have reported issues when trying to generate two-factor authentication codes via SMS — texts either never received, or delayed by several hours.
Faulty SMS two-factor codes mean users can be locked out of their accounts and lose control of them.They may also find themselves unable to change security settings or use Twitter to download data access functionThe situation also provides an early hint that problems within Twitter’s infrastructure are surfacing.
Not all users will have issues receiving SMS authentication codes, and those relying on authenticator apps or physical authentication tokens to protect their Twitter accounts may have no reason to test the mechanism. But users have been self-reporting issues on Twitter since the weekend, and WIRED confirmed that on at least some accounts, authentication texts were delayed by hours or not at all. The debacle comes less than two weeks after Twitter laid off about half of its workforce, roughly 3,700 people. Since then, engineers, operations experts, IT staff and security teams have been hard at work tweaking Twitter’s products and building new features around new owner Elon Musk’s agenda.
Reports suggest the company may have laid off too many workers too quickly and has been trying to rehire some. At the same time, Musk has publicly stated that he is instructing employees to disable certain parts of the platform. “Part of today is shutting down ‘microservices’ bloatware.” He tweets this morning. “Twitter actually needs less than 20% to work!”
Twitter, whose communications arm is reportedly defunct, did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment on the issue of SMS two-factor authentication codes.Elon Musk did not reply tweet solicit opinions.
“A temporary outage of multi-factor authentication could prevent people from accessing their accounts. But more worryingly, it would encourage users to disable multi-factor authentication entirely, which would make them less secure.” What caused the issue reported by so many people, but it certainly could have been caused by the announced large-scale changes to network services.”
SMS texts aren’t the most secure way to receive verification codes, but many users still rely on the mechanism, and security researchers agree that it’s better than nothing. Therefore, even intermittent or sporadic outages can cause problems for users and potentially put them at risk.
Over the years, Twitter’s SMS verification code delivery system has experienced stability issues several times.For example, in August 2020, Twitter supported tweets“We are investigating account verification codes that were not sent via text message or phone call. We apologize for the inconvenience and will keep you updated as we continue to work to resolve this issue.” Three diva, company Add to“We have more work to do to fix captcha delivery, but we are making progress. We apologize for the frustration this has caused and thank you for your patience as we continue to work on it. We Hopefully that will be resolved soon for those who did not receive the code.”
