Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Travelzoo's Twitter-Interruptus

As of this writing at around 4:12 p.m. EST, Travelzoo's Twitter account has been inaccessible for at least three hours.

If you try to access the account, you navigate to a message from Twitter which says: "Who goes there? Sorry, the account you were headed to has been suspended due to strange activity. Mosey along now, nothing to see here."

In general, Twitter says accounts can be suspended for these reasons, which include breaches of terms of service, technical abuse and investigations into spamming. The investigations can take up to 30 days.

Here is a link to the Twitter Rules.

A Travelzoo spokeswoman at around 1:30 p.m. characterized its account status as: "Just a little bug with our account. We are working with Twitter to fix it and should be up and running soon."

And, a second spokeswoman said: "Twitter is working on our account now. We will resume our tweets once they finish."

I hope Travelzoo is being forthcoming because the worst way to deal with any potential negative news is to try to spin it.

Twitter gives the following advice to companies or individuals with suspended accounts:

"Our Spam/Abuse or Support team researches suspended accounts. If you feel your account has been wrongly suspended, please visit Twitter Support and file a request. If you're logged into Twitter, you can visit Twitter Support by clicking the help link directly from your Twitter account.

"Submit a request: your ticket will be submitted to Twitter Support and we'll email you a ticket confirmation. Accounts may be suspended for a minimum of 30 days for research. Check on your ticket status anytime by visiting your Twitter Support home page and clicking Check on your existing requests.

"If you're unable to submit a request through our help form, please send an email to suspended@twitter.com."

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