IN THE latest setback plaguing controversial social network Twitter, a bug has reportedly restored users' previously deleted tweets - and when questioned by the press over the issue, replied with a poop emoji.

According to numerous reports online, the bug appears to have affected scores of users, allowing their tweets to be restored even after they have been deleted.

While it has not yet been made clear what caused the bug or how many users were affected, Twitter has reportedly already taken steps to address the issue, and the bug appears to have been fixed among some users.

This is yet another issue for the beleaguered social media platform, which has been facing mounting criticism over its privacy practices, user experience, and handling of political content.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor at ZDNET, who wrote a post outlining the Twitter issue, said the social network replied with a poop emoji from its press email account over the problem, remaining true to the word of its owner.

"As for Twitter, when asked, the company replied with a poop emoji. Which, believe it or not, is now Elon Musk's preferred response to press questions," Vaughan-Nichols said.

In March, Musk tweeted that the social network would respond to all press enquiries to its press@twitter.com email address with a poop emoji.

Vaughan-Nichols said in his post, that he first noticed the Twitter problem when Richard Morrell, an open-source developer, posted about the issue on social network Mastodon.

Morrell, who is also a security expert, and former CTO and Chairman of SmoothWall, was one of the first to report the issue stating that he had deleted all of his tweets, only for them to reappear.

"Last November, I deleted all my Tweets. Every single one. I then ran Redact and deleted all my likes, my media, and retweets. 38k tweets gone. … Woke up today to find 34k of them restored by Twitter, who presumably brought a server farm back up," Morrell wrote on Mastodon.

Morrell's discovery led to over 400 people reportedly experiencing the same issue - having their deleted tweets restored.

Some tweets were reportedly deleted as far back as two years ago but have now been brought back to life, suggesting that when a user deletes a tweet, it may not be permanently deleted from Twitter's servers, spawning new privacy concerns over the microblog.

Morrell estimated that over a million tweets had been recovered from just the people in his circles, potentially meaning that millions of other deleted tweets may still be accessible to users.

"I am pretty sure they've restored cold storage because all the restored tweets have date-time characteristics," Morrell said.

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