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December 14, 2007

T-Mobile Turns Off Twitter?

Nick Gonzalez

71 comments »

twitter.pngReports alleging T-Mobile has shut off Twitter for their customers are rolling in. Complaints have surfaced on T-Mobile’s user forum on Satisfaction as well as several other personal blogs and forums. A T-Mobile representative replied to a customer’s service request with this email:

…Twitter is not an authorized third-party service provider, and therefore you are not able to utilize service from this provide any longer…. T-Mobile is not in violation of any agreement by not providing service to Twitter. T-Mobile regrets any inconvenience, however please note that if you remain under contract and choose to cancel service, you will be responsible for the $200 early termination fee that would be assessed to the account at cancellation.

I’m a T-Mobile customer and testing the issue right now, although I have received sporadic updates as recently as last night. It would be quite astonishing if T-Mobile is blocking an opt-in text messaging service considering how common they are and T-Mobile’s relatively small market share in the U.S. However, it wouldn’t be the first time the company has been at loggerheads with a third party service. Earlier this year, T-Mobile blocked VOIP-based free calling service Truphone, but eventually lost in court.

Update: I have been able to receive messages, but not send them. I have not had the same problem with other short codes. An email is in to T Mobile’s customer support. We’ve also called customer support.

Customer support, at least, says they don’t have a blanket policy against the use of any services on their phones, although they cannot guarantee the operation of any such services. After explaining what Twitter was, T-Mobile tried out the service and pinned the problem on Twitter after receiving a “service temporarily down” message. Biz Stone, however, says T Mobile has blocked them.

Commentors have received sporadic service.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Gouch

    December 14th, 2007 at 4:11 pm

    Death to AOL.

    Off topic I know, just had to.

  2. Bob

    December 14th, 2007 at 4:14 pm

    I have been affected for 3 days but only for sending messages. I have been able to receive messages (with the loss of some here and there) the whole time. I have the entire email that I received from T-Mobile posted on my blog:

    http://blog.bibleboy.org/2007/.....obile.html

    It doesnt look good :(

  3. Aaron B. Hockley

    December 14th, 2007 at 4:22 pm

    I don’t normally send via TXT but just tried and failed; looks like T-Mobile is blocking it for me.

  4. Marco

    December 14th, 2007 at 4:28 pm

    Since yesterday I have also been unable to send twitter updates. However, in the posting of this comment, I tried sending two texts to the twitter short-code. The first one went through, but the second one did not. Instead I received a reply (from the Twitter short code) with a text message which reads, “Service is temporarily down. Please, try again later.”

    Lame.

  5. nate

    December 14th, 2007 at 4:32 pm

    I don’t understand why they would do that? Twitter is just a recipient/sender of SMS messages. Doesn’t that help their bottom line if people are sending more texts?

  6. Brad Jashinsky

    December 14th, 2007 at 4:35 pm

    These telecoms just continue to make the argument for net neutrality with their actions just as much of the press that was so rampant in the past has once again died down. I don’t understand exactly how sending text messages to Twitter is hurting them anyway. I’m not sure how T-Mobile plans are setup, but some carriers allow for text messages to be received for free so I could how that could both T-Mobile. They are making money off of those text messages being sent, and by blocking them are greatly frustrating some of their best customers (Most Twitter users I know have top cell phone plans).

  7. Alaska Miller

    December 14th, 2007 at 4:40 pm

    The reason is simple: too many people have been using Twitter without buying text messaging packages and then calling in when they find their bill too high. To avoid the headache they’ve simply gone ahead to block Twitter to avoid future misuses.

    T-mobile has been a stickler for their SMS pricing because the pricing been used twice already in the past 3 years for a lot of people to get out of their contracts early and without paying ETF. Disputes over SMS is a headache to them, this is just corporate policy.

  8. Chris Parandian

    December 14th, 2007 at 4:49 pm

    This is a very bad decision for T-mobile - if true.

    Twitter has provided mobile social networking to folks. For instance, Tweet-ups or just meeting up with one of your twitter friends if you are randomly in the same area…

    Chris
    http://www.mobilediner.com/

  9. Sean

    December 14th, 2007 at 5:04 pm

    Twitter can send out such a barrage of SMS messages that perhaps that’s why they’re blocking them. I’m personally not a fan of Twitter at all, but at the same time this is like an ISP getting angry that you’re downloading too much data…not a good sign.

  10. Casey Edwinson

    December 14th, 2007 at 5:04 pm

    Might be a good time to try http://www.jyngle.com/

  11. John

    December 14th, 2007 at 5:10 pm

    I am a T-Mobile customer; I just tried to send to Twitter and got a reply back saying “Service is temporarily down. Please try again later.”

    T-Mobile is totally screwing the pooch on this one!

  12. buster

    December 14th, 2007 at 5:13 pm

    install google chat, use twitter that way. pretty easy.

  13. Matt

    December 14th, 2007 at 5:22 pm

    I wonder how this plays in the net neutrality debate?

  14. Jacqui

    December 14th, 2007 at 5:36 pm

    I haven’t been able to send texts to Twitter all day through T-Mobile. I am honestly going to leave the service (after having been a rabidly loyal customer for the last 8 years, since the VoiceStream days) if this is a permanent thing. Not “just because of” Twitter, but this is one of the (several) last straws.

  15. jamboree

    December 14th, 2007 at 5:42 pm

    Good riddance… too much Twitter spam.. *ahem* bacn.

  16. Erik

    December 14th, 2007 at 5:56 pm

    Pure speculation here…

    If t-mo got customer complaints about the content of some tweets being against CSCA guidelines they might react by shutting down the short code (twitter’s) that sent those sms’s.

    T-mo has always been a bit strange about short code based SMS. They do not allow their prepaids to receive SMS from any short code.

  17. Heretic

    December 14th, 2007 at 6:10 pm

    Great customer relations. “and if you don’t like it remember that we can do whatever we want because it’s in the contract.. oh, and that’ll be $200 you owe us for choosing the wrong asshats for your telecommunication needs.”

  18. Jon

    December 14th, 2007 at 6:12 pm

    Everybody should throw away their cell phones in protest… teach these phone companies that they aren’t needed any longer. The added benefit is peace and quiet in places like movie theaters, halls and classrooms!

    Jon

  19. Ed

    December 14th, 2007 at 6:30 pm

    Personally, I always find Alaska’s comments rather rude, but this time she seems to make the most sense out of anyone here! Which just goes to show how hard-core some twitterers can get.

  20. Bobby

    December 14th, 2007 at 7:10 pm

    T-mobile doesn’t have a forum on that site, that site has an unofficial forum for T-mobile.

  21. Christopher Schmidt

    December 14th, 2007 at 7:40 pm

    I’ve thus far found many people confirming that messaging to Twitter’s short code is not working, and not a single one saying that it is. Receiving the text messages is not blocked.

    I’m slightly confused on the use of the term “Third Party Service” to send an SMS to a short-code. Is using SMS short codes a third party service in some way? that’s news to me: I had assumed that they were, to the mobile carrier, just like any other number.

  22. Clintus McGintus

    December 14th, 2007 at 7:46 pm

    Fraking pissed about this right now. Seriously. This is almost enough to make me walk. That iPhone plan is looking better every day.

  23. TechCrunch

    December 14th, 2007 at 8:02 pm

    OMG! The life is over - now twitter users have to take shit without anyone noticing!

  24. Michael Bauser

    December 14th, 2007 at 8:26 pm

    Christopher, your assumption is, sadly, incorrect. Short codes are “value-added services” outside the normal standards & regulations governing phone numbers. Support of short codes is always at the discretion of your phone carrier.

    CSCA assigns most short codes in the United States. Lots of legalese there, for anybody interested.

    For those of you panicking at Twitter withdrawal: If you phone supports international text messaging (which curiously, even my prepaid T-Mobile phone does), you can still send tweets to the U.K. Twitter number. I just tested it. It will probably cost you extra, though, so check your plan first, OK?

  25. David Mackey

    December 14th, 2007 at 8:26 pm

    What in the world would T-Mobile block Twitter? It doesn’t make business sense. The more txt msgs sent the more money T-Mobile makes.

  26. Dave Ambrose

    December 14th, 2007 at 8:44 pm

    my account has been off as well for the past three days. i’m not pleased at all.

  27. Steve Ballmer

    December 14th, 2007 at 8:52 pm

    … No great loss!

  28. Luke

    December 14th, 2007 at 9:09 pm

    That make me so mad! I pay so I can send text messages… why do they care who i send them to!

  29. Dave Ambrose

    December 14th, 2007 at 9:12 pm

    here’s the digg story:

    http://digg.com/tech_news/T_Mobile_blocks_Twitter

  30. cbmeeks

    December 14th, 2007 at 10:03 pm

    I wished every cell phone company would burn in hell with their back broke.

    http://codershangout.com

  31. sue

    December 14th, 2007 at 11:54 pm

    Good. Twiitter is a great example of a web 2.0 company feeding the narcissistic gen Yers who think people actually give a shit about what they are doing or thinking at all times. You should have to pay for wasting bandwidth like that!

  32. Oli4000

    December 15th, 2007 at 2:19 am

    Or use m.twitter.com in your mobile’s webbrowser (and make sure you have a data plan). If it’s true you can still receive text messages you can have twitter send you IM updates via sms.

  33. Intercon

    December 15th, 2007 at 3:16 am

    All (all these, all varieties, all possible forms) of SMS-related issues,
    debates, arguments, issues, blocks, headaches, conflicts-of-interests,
    etc etc etc have mostly been seen through in, where? China.

    The conclusion? Fight with the celco’s? Good luck. Particularly in the
    US where most people have to pay to receive SMS?? That
    is almost unthinkable in China (and many countries around the world.)

    In this case, the US is quite “unique” wrt its SMS “pricing strategy”, /ac.

  34. Mattias

    December 15th, 2007 at 3:50 am

    I think this is an outrage. I don’t care to much about Twitter but what T-mobile does is simply dangerous for the development of the mobile industry.

    The cornerstone of the great, fast development of the Internet rests on the fact that a great site or application is available for billions of customers around the world from day one.

    If the same doesn’t go for cellphones, we wont see the same development of this industry and in the end operators themselves will suffer.

    I wrote about it on my blog as well, and I hope that more people will call out for this mobile net neutrality issue.

    49things.blogspot.com

  35. Ivan Pleština

    December 15th, 2007 at 4:01 am

    @ 33

    You have to pay to receive SMS in US? Serious? I’m really stunned ’cause in Croatia, country that is not even in EU and can’t even come close to be called economically advanced, something like that would not be even imaginable. SMS is a must have service which we pay only 0.05$-0.08$ per OUTGOING message.

    Stunned indeed.

  36. PJ Brunet

    December 15th, 2007 at 6:10 am

    #30 has a good point ;-)

  37. laanba

    December 15th, 2007 at 7:59 am

    @ Ivan

    I think you will find that the US cell market and practices are far behind the rest of the world.

  38. afu1979

    December 15th, 2007 at 8:30 am

    I tried to send a message to Google SMS service this morning and got the same message. I wonder what other services that T-mobile is limiting. Customer of T-mobile have to make this an issue.

  39. Fake Micheal Arrington

    December 15th, 2007 at 8:49 am

    Well, i just called to cancel our services and was told that they are working on it.

    We 10 lines with Tmobile and spend about 6-7k a month. I was giggling when she said they will get back to us. I told her she has 2 days to fix whatever is going on.

    I will update you on what happens, we are willing to pay the 2k to get out from them, but they sure will lose 7k a month.

    let the play begin.

  40. Intercon

    December 15th, 2007 at 8:58 am

    @35, yes, at least for over 90% of my friends in the US — excepting those who purchased some bundled sms package.

    In brief, in the US, the common sms pricing strategy for most operators are -
    1) Outgoing: free (either from handset, or from web)
    2) Incoming: recipient pay per sms, or deduct from bundled sms monthly quota

    Well, we’ve so many people from the US on this post, so, someone could tell the mainstream story to the contrary.. what I said was only from my best knowledge.. /ac.

  41. Edward Vielmetti

    December 15th, 2007 at 10:21 am

    Just filled out the T-Mobile customer service “contact us” support form page, will report on any replies.

  42. Intercon

    December 15th, 2007 at 11:29 am

    On the other hand, it’s equally astonishing to see that the twitter community is super-forgiving to Twitter (company) itself.

    1) all along almost fully assuming Twitter is totally innocent in the t-mobile issue… (hope they indeed are)..

    2) for a group im service, of this-size community, of this-much influence, with so-many mashups (how many pages across the web with the twitter-based widgets and api renders hanging), with some most-promising awards, and so on and so forth, to give a “major downtime” with such a short-notice, for such an extended period of totally-down, without much real explanations (”move data center” — planned? unplanned? …?…?), and essentially nobody seem to even ask a mildly-serious question… and just do as they say, to just rush to “tell your friends!”…

    which is quite unimaginable, and really set a bad example (of web2.0 service — too-bad-if-it’s-down-it’s-down) (and, community tolerance — twitter did that, nobody grievanced…) System planning? a thing so passe… service level? there’s no stinking service level.. “we are not google…” “love me, love my dog…” In fact, they’ve taken a subtle advantage of “the t-mobile incident” pretty well… the focus is on, t-mobile, not t-witter…

    Well, whatever, it’s bound to be a pretty bad precedence… For the record –

    > Friday, December 14, 2007
    >
    > Twitter Maintenance This Saturday
    >
    > We have a big maintenance job to do this weekend. There’s a note in the Twitter UI now but it bears repeating here. We’re going to be taking Twitter offline this Saturday from 10am to 10pm PST for maintenance. This includes the Twitter.com web site, SMS interaction, IM interaction, and even API projects like Twitterrific. Tell your friends!

  43. Mark Smithivas

    December 15th, 2007 at 12:04 pm

    I just got a voicemail from someone named Ralph in the T-Mobile executive office. I had sent the CEO an e-mail last night. Have to give them some credit for a quick response. I suspect they’re in damage control mode right now…

  44. Dan

    December 15th, 2007 at 12:43 pm

    Just get a jott account (jott.com), go to your jott links and add twitter to your links. (It’s predone, you just have to click a button and name the link.) Then all you do is call jott and send your twit that way. No need to use SMS at all.

    And it’s actually easier to twit that way, anyway.

  45. Mark Smithivas

    December 15th, 2007 at 12:48 pm

    Okay, Ralph called back. I got back some weasel words suggesting that T-mobile “isn’t blocking Twitter” but that they can’t guarantee third party apps will work on their network. When I asked why then don’t they come out publicly and defend themselves when they’re being absolutely crucified on boards like this, he said something to the effect of “we don’t feel that’s warranted”. Lame. That is so PR 1.0 in my book.

  46. Michael Bauser

    December 15th, 2007 at 1:55 pm

    Doubtless less than 1% of T-Mobile’s customers use Twitter. Seriously. They’re getting “crucified” on 4 or 5 blogs, by a couple of dozen people. I can totally understand why they don’t think that’s enough to “defend” against. They’re the giant corporation; we just gnats.

    By the way, I forgot to mention earlier: It’s not like Twitter is the only website T-Mobile won’t play nice with. They don’t support MMS or SMS to Facebook Mobile, either. Here’s the ridiculous message board thread where Facebook users bitch at Facebook when they should be bitching at T-Mobile.

  47. Dan Patterson

    December 15th, 2007 at 2:24 pm

    I noticed the ’service temporary down’ starting last night. I’ve been a customer of T-Mobile for almost 5 years, but the terrible service and this type of stuff is aweful. The customer service is great, but not enough to save them if this is permanent. Bad, bad move…

  48. john doerr

    December 15th, 2007 at 2:57 pm

    If Twitter people are reading this - what is your aggregator telling you? (lemme guess - they don’t know much). They are the ones with a line directly into the SMSC tech/pr/marketing engine and can get the official answer far quicker than anyone else.

    Neustar are useless (except for ripping us off with their fee structure).

    TMO are the most cocky, incomprehensibly greedy telco in the SMS B2C space. No free content, most restrictive campaign policies - the list goes on. This is not really surprising at all.

  49. Anyone

    December 15th, 2007 at 2:59 pm

    LOL, recipient pays? Sorry, just wondering what the heck, for us it’s “you say, you pay” sort of deal all over: under 10 euro cents per text for pretty much any plan plus text packages with 1000 messages under 10€/month, no limitations of third party apps that I’m aware of… enjoy the corporate America ;) (but all the sympathy for anyone affected, net neutrality might be worth the fight you might have to take on so that this sort of thing doesn’t have to spread any further)

    This might be a good read
    http://www.micropersuasion.com.....y_fac.html

  50. Sean McCune

    December 15th, 2007 at 4:05 pm

    So you have to be an “authorized third-party service provider” with T-Mobile in order for you to send SMS messages to T-Mobile subscribers? If I was a T-Mobile customer I’d cough up the 200 bucks and be gone. Even AT&T and Verizon seem to be coming to their senses a bit. But T-Mobile’s plowing ahead with the “you’ll get what service *we* decide to give you”model.

  51. Michael Bauser

    December 15th, 2007 at 6:06 pm

    Technically, you have to be “an authorized service” with every phone company, if you want to use a shorter-than-seven-digit number. That’s what people here aren’t getting: Any phone company is allowed to do this.

    By the way, Twitter just claimed T-Mobile supports Twitter again. They don’t give details.

  52. j

    December 15th, 2007 at 6:53 pm

    yeah, it’s working for me.

  53. Scott

    December 15th, 2007 at 6:57 pm

    T-Mobile can block incoming messages by turning off the shortcode but you can actually still send messages to T-Mobile subs by other means inlcuding International carriers (although these are unreliable as experienced by some users). The “more messages - more revenue” argument seems logical enough, but there are a long list of things that T-Mobile puts ahead of revenue when it comes to services.

  54. Ruggy

    December 15th, 2007 at 7:01 pm

    The twits…

  55. Intercon

    December 15th, 2007 at 9:11 pm

    @42, update - Twitter downtime now revised to 4 hours instead of 12, and moved to midnight hours, and more reasonably (less arrogantly) worded.. good and great.. little changes but big improvements, deserve to be loved by your community.

    > http://blog.twitter.com/2007/1.....orter.html

    > Saturday, December 15, 2007

    > Downtime Rescheduled, Shorter

    > We announced on Friday that we were going to be doing some maintenance on Twitter all day today. It turns out we were able to do most of the work without taking Twitter offline. It may have been better referred to as a “maintenance window” but we wanted to make sure you were aware just the same.

    However, to make the final move to our new data center we will definitely need take Twitter offline for about four hours while we copy the database over. So, please take note of the newly scheduled down-time for Twitter: 10PM—2AM PST starting Sunday evening. Thanks!

  56. Bob K Mertz

    December 15th, 2007 at 11:36 pm

    It appears that the issue still isn’t 100% resolved. I’ve been having a few issues over the last hour, as have other people. But I think we’re on the right track at least!

    http://blog.bibleboy.org/2007/.....there.html

  57. Alexis Brion

    December 16th, 2007 at 8:12 am

    T-Mobile is a monopoly in home land, Germany. This is the attitude they are used to.

  58. Markus Fine

    December 16th, 2007 at 2:26 pm

    It’s T-Mobile’s playground, and they should be able to do whatever they want with it. If twitter is doing something off-side, you can’t cry if they get spanked.

  59. Michael

    December 16th, 2007 at 4:13 pm

    There are still plenty of ways to access Twitter (and I hope T-Mobile doesn’t block those as well!)… These have probably already been mentioned in 58 previous comments, but…

    (1) Twitter via Google Talk
    (2) Twitter via the m.twitter.com site
    (3) Twitter via an installable Twitter client

    I hope I get to keep my mobile Twitter… It’s what keeps me going during really boring meetings!

  60. Bob

    December 17th, 2007 at 3:11 pm

    You might find this interesting:

    http://blog.bibleboy.org/2007/.....obile.html

  61. zac echola

    December 17th, 2007 at 6:17 pm

    Got this in the ol’ email today:

    Dear Zac Echola:

    My name is Marianne Maestas and I am with the Executive Customer Relations department of T-Mobile. I am contacting you on behalf of Mr. Robert Dotson in regards to the email that you sent him over the weekend.

    Twitter users are welcome to stay connected through T-Mobile service. Rumors that T-Mobile blocks the service are false. T-Mobile confirmed with Twitter that there was a technical issue between the two companies’ systems that temporarily prevented some customers from utilizing the service this past weekend. That issue has since been resolved and the companies are working to prevent such incidents from re-occurring.

    Should you have any further questions regarding this matter, please feel free to contact Customer Care at 800-937-8997. Thank you.

    Marianne Maestas,
    Executive Customer Relations Specialist,
    Office of the President,

  62. macbikegeek

    December 28th, 2007 at 4:07 pm

    Statement from T-Mobile on their website:

    http://www.t-mobile.com/compan.....on+Twitter

    That’s the good news. Still can’t get send to work from my phone…

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