Twitter is temporarily disabling the ability to send tweets via SMS text messages.
The company says it’s doing this in an effort to protect peoples’ accounts:
“We’re taking this step because of vulnerabilities that need to be addressed by mobile carriers and our reliance on having a linked phone number for two-factor authentication (we’re working on improving this).”
It’s perhaps no coincidence that this change comes only days after Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had his account compromised, which lead to hackers sending vulgar tweets using the Tweet via SMS method.
When tweeting via SMS was enabled, hackers could send tweets through another account without being logged in to the account itself. They just had to gain control of the phone number linked to the account.
Sending tweets via SMS is less important now than it was in the early days of Twitter when smartphones weren’t as ubiquitous as they are today.
However, the feature still exists, and Twitter realizes that some markets are more dependent on it than others. The company says it will reactive the feature in those markets only as it works on a longer-term solution.
