Update: The problem has been corrected and Twitter has explained it (somewhat) here: http://status.twitter.com/post/136164828/restoring-accidentally-suspended-accounts

Since I cannot access my Twitter account to tweet about this I guess I’ll just have to blog about it! Since I have found I am not the only one affected by this problem, I sure hope Twitter fixes it!

So I came home from vacation and found I could not log into my Twitter account, it had been suspended! Since I do not do anything that violates their Terms of Service I was really upset about this! I sent them a support ticket and this is what I received in reply:

## In replies all text above this line is added to the ticket ##
Ticket #411491: I came back from vacation t…
Hi there, funfelt!

This is an automated response to share reasons why Twitter suspends accounts for spam/abuse investigation. If you’re reporting spam, please report spam in the future by following @spam and sending us a direct message, or by blocking the spam accounts you come across, as we closely monitor blocked accounts.

Please visit your own profile page to make sure you’re actually suspended and not viewing another person’s suspended profile page– many people think they are suspended when they aren’t. You’ll know you’re suspended if you log in and see a red notice announcing your suspension on your account.

Twitter suspends accounts for Terms of Service violations or spam investigation. Please review our policies for more detailed information:
http://help.twitter.com/forums/26257/entries

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.

It’s important to us that the Twitter community receives only the content they’d like to receive. While we do welcome feed-based accounts, we discourage aggressive following and other tactics that will alarm people.

If you feel you’ve been suspended in error, please reply to this email with a short explanation if you haven’t already, and don’t forget to include your user name. We’ll be in touch with more information soon.

Thanks for your understanding in this matter,

Twitter Support

Your request summary is:

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funfelt, Jul 05 04:17 pm:

I came back from vacation to find my Twitter account suspended. Please please tell me why I have not violated TOS, I love all my followers, I just don’t understand. I really want to understand and fix the problem. I have been a loyal active twitter member for almost a year now and am I going to lose all my friends now? Please help!

This email is a service from Twitter Support

What the heck?? The only thing I can figure is I did have a Tweetlater and Twollow accounts, both of which had very minor niche keywords that I had set up to auto-follow. Basically so that I would be made aware of people who were talking about very specific things, because I would be INTERESTED in them and want to read what they had to say on the topics, and that we would have something in common. Most had to do with teaching or direct sales. There were very few and got very few results so I would hardly classify that as aggressive following! I have not done anything wrong, I do not spam. In fact for someone who is in ’sales’ I promote my business VERY little. I hardly ever send links since I think it is annoying - I want to get the jist of something within the 140 chars, not have to click and go read some more before finding out if I WANT to read more. The only time I ever really promote my business is if I am retweeting someone’s giveaway or once in a while I put out our specials or newsletter. I think my followers would agree it is hardly invasive and if nothing else I probably should tweet MORE about what I do vs. just every day chit chat or inspirational quotes. Most of my tweets are RTs of someone else’s wisdom! I don’t get it.

Twitter, you done me wrong. You got the wrong girl. I can point you to 100s who continually annoy the heck out of me with their spammy tweets, never sharing or helping, repeating themselves over and over, or sending phony sentiments I can see right through. Please, have a heart and give me and others like me our accounts back before you lose some quality people! I’ll be at Facebook for now!