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Think 280-character tweets suck? Two guys in Germany figured out how to send a 30,396-character tweet that pretty much broke Twitter. And it wasn’t even that hard to figure out.
This past weekend, two guys from Germany figured out a trick to get completely around Twitter’s character limit.
The tweet began by saying, according to The Next Web, who used Google translate because it was in German, “People! @Timrasett and @HackneyYT can exceed the character limit! You do not believe us? Here’s about 35k characters proof.”
They then followed that sentence up with about 30,000 more characters of random nonsensical text.
Here, have a look…
If you're wondering how twitter[.]com/Timrasett/status/926903967027785728 works:
[27024-char domain name].cc/[3244-char directory name] pic.twitter.com/vG26Jvz27F
— hex waxwing :(){ :|: &};: (@hexwaxwing) November 4, 2017
The tweet has since been deleted because, well, a 30,000-character tweet can cause a few issues – like Twitter crashing – so both guys were banned. (They’ve since been reinstated.)
Goodnight sweet prince pic.twitter.com/cB0La8bZKQ
— CubeBag (@cubebag) November 4, 2017
https://twitter.com/Timrasett/status/927158740297674752
So how did they do it? Remember when Twitter decided that links would no longer count against the character limit? Turns out that all that nonsense they wrote was just one long URL. Whoops!
You can still view it on the Internet Archive though.
Oh, and they’re not done messing with Twitter either…
https://twitter.com/HackneyYT/status/927220419584774145
Godspeed, gentlemen.