47 Fun Facts About Twitter

Which live-streaming app did Twitter buy in 2015, before it had launched?

Periscope launched in March 2015, but Twitter shut the app down in March 2021, citing declining usage and the rising cost of maintaining it.

In June 2009, Twitter postponed a network upgrade because protesters in which country were relying on it?

Iran's post-election protesters were using Twitter to reach the world, so the upgrade was moved to 1:30 a.m. Iranian time.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey also co-founded which payments company?

Square began after co-founder Jim McKelvey lost a sale of one of his glass faucets because he couldn't accept the buyer's credit card.

What did the very first tweet, posted by Jack Dorsey in March 2006, say?

Jack Dorsey's first tweet read 'just setting up my twttr'; he later sold it as an NFT for about $2.9 million in March 2021.

Twitter grew out of a side project at which startup?

Twitter began as a side project at Odeo, a podcasting service; its founders formed Obvious Corporation, bought Odeo back from its investors and spun Twitter out in April 2007.

What was Twitter's original character limit for a tweet?

140 characters let a tweet and the sender's username fit inside a single 160-character text message, the format Twitter was first built around.

Which language kept the old tweet limit when Twitter moved to 280 in 2017?

Korean, like Japanese and Chinese, kept the old limit because one character in those languages can carry about twice the information of one in English.

At which 2007 event did Twitter's popularity take off, winning it an award?

South by Southwest turned Twitter into a hit, but the rush of new users that year left the young service notorious for its downtime.

Who introduced the hashtag to Twitter in 2007?

Chris Messina borrowed the idea from IRC chat channels; Twitter's team wasn't keen, but hashtags caught on during the October 2007 San Diego wildfires.

What was the error image shown during Twitter's early outages, with birds hoisting a sea creature?

The fail whale began as 'Lifting a Dreamer', a birthday card Yiying Lu drew for faraway friends, before Twitter put it on its over-capacity page.

Live updates from which January 2008 keynote slowed Twitter to a crawl?

Steve Jobs at Macworld was unveiling the MacBook Air, billed as the world's thinnest notebook, as the flood of live updates overwhelmed Twitter.

Twitter's first bird logo was clip art by British designer Simon Oxley, bought from which stock-image website?

iStockphoto was also where GitHub found Oxley's drawing 'Octopuss', which it bought and renamed the Octocat.

Whose account was the first on Twitter to reach one million followers, in 2009?

Ashton Kutcher had challenged CNN's breaking-news account to the race and beat it by about half an hour, having promised 10,000 mosquito nets to charity if he won.

Which baseball manager's lawsuit over an impersonator helped prompt the 2009 launch of Verified Accounts?

Twitter denied settling Tony La Russa's suit over a fake account, and in the same June 2009 post previewed its Verified Accounts beta.

In January 2010, who posted the first unassisted tweet from off Earth?

A NASA astronaut on the ISS, T. J. Creamer, sent the first unassisted tweet from space on 22 January 2010 once the station gained live internet access.

Which escaped animal got a hit parody Twitter account during its week on the loose in March 2011?

The Bronx Zoo cobra, an Egyptian cobra, had never left its building: after a seven-day search it turned up in a non-public corner of the Reptile House.

What handle did Pope Benedict XVI use when he joined Twitter in December 2012?

@pontifex, Benedict XVI's handle, comes from a Latin priestly title probably meaning 'bridge-maker' or 'path-maker', and passed to Pope Francis after Benedict resigned in 2013.

What was Vine, launched by Twitter in 2013?

Vine, a short-video service, let people share six-second looping clips until Twitter announced its closure in October 2016, about four years after launch.

Who claimed responsibility for hijacking the AP's account in April 2013 and briefly moving the stock market?

The Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-Assad hacking group, posted a false tweet from the AP's account about an explosion at the White House, briefly knocking US stocks down.

Fans of which Studio Ghibli film set the record for most tweets in one second in August 2013?

Castle in the Sky's TV airing in Japan drove 143,199 tweets in one second, about 25 times Twitter's average rate, and the service stayed up.

Which host's Oscars 'selfie' became the most retweeted image ever in March 2014?

Ellen DeGeneres's selfie was actually taken by Bradley Cooper, and the rush to retweet it briefly crashed Twitter during the ceremony.

Which Japanese billionaire's New Year giveaway tweet became the most retweeted ever in January 2019?

Yusaku Maezawa, founder of the online retailer Zozo, promised cash to people who retweeted it, overtaking Carter Wilkerson's 2017 record tweet.

What was Twitter's 'fleets' feature, launched worldwide in November 2020?

Fleets were 'Posts that vanished after 24 hours', which Twitter hoped would coax more people into posting.

What did Twitter launch as Spaces in 2021?

Spaces, a live-audio conversation feature, took on Clubhouse, and Twitter announced ticketed rooms so hosts could charge listeners to join.

What did the hijacked tweets in July 2020's hack of Obama's and Gates's accounts urge?

The tweets urged followers to 'Send bitcoin to double their money' — a classic doubling scam; Twitter temporarily blocked all verified accounts from tweeting while it regained control.

What was the original name of the fact-checking programme renamed Community Notes in 2022?

Birdwatch began in January 2021 as a small pilot in which ordinary users, not Twitter staff, wrote context notes on misleading tweets.

Which decentralised social network began in 2019 as a research project funded by Twitter?

Bluesky began as a small team Jack Dorsey funded to build open, decentralised standards that could change how Twitter itself hosts content.

What was the paid subscription that became X Premium called when it launched in June 2021?

Twitter Blue debuted in Canada and Australia with perks such as Undo Tweet; the blue checkmark only joined the bundle after Musk's 2022 takeover.

How much did Elon Musk pay to acquire Twitter in October 2022?

Musk paid US$44 billion, or $54.20 a share, after trying to walk away over spam bots, being sued in Delaware and then reversing course before trial.

After becoming a major Twitter shareholder in April 2022, what did Musk accept, then decline?

His board seat was set to become official before Musk changed his mind; days later he made an unsolicited offer to buy the whole company.

What tactic did Twitter's board first adopt to resist Musk's takeover before accepting his offer?

A 'poison pill' plan, adopted on April 15, 2022, aimed to make a hostile takeover costly, yet ten days later the board accepted Musk's $54.20-a-share bid.

Which CEO did Musk fire on the day he completed the takeover?

Parag Agrawal, CEO since Dorsey's exit in November 2021, was fired along with CFO Ned Segal and legal chief Vijaya Gadde the day the deal closed; half the workforce soon followed.

How did Musk dismiss the old, free verification system when announcing paid checkmarks in November 2022?

Musk dismissed legacy checks as 'lords & peasants' while pitching an $8-a-month paid checkmark; impersonators abused it, and new sign-ups were halted days after launch.

Who succeeded Elon Musk as Twitter's CEO in June 2023?

Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal's former advertising chief, took over while advertisers were fleeing the platform after Musk's takeover; she stepped down in July 2025.

Before naming Twitter X, Musk had co-founded X.com, a 1999 online bank that later became what?

PayPal was the name X.com took after merging with Confinity, and Musk bought the X.com domain back from PayPal in 2017, years before the rebrand.

Musk said he wanted to turn X into an 'everything app' modelled on which Chinese service?

WeChat was the model Musk cited for an 'everything app', and in July 2023 he renamed Twitter X, the name he had given that app.

In March 2025, X Corp. was acquired by which other Musk company?

xAI took over X in an all-stock deal that valued the platform at $33 billion after debt, below what Musk had paid for Twitter.

Which AI chatbot was built into X for paying subscribers in 2023?

Grok takes its name from a verb Robert Heinlein coined in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land for a deep, intuitive kind of understanding.

What is t.co?

t.co is Twitter's own URL shortener: every link posted is wrapped in a t.co address, so the company can screen for malicious sites and track clicks.

What question originally appeared above Twitter's posting box?

Twitter's box originally asked 'What are you doing?', the status-update idea Jack Dorsey first pitched, before users ignored it to share news and events instead.

After January 6, 2021, Twitter suspended 70,000+ accounts for content linked to which conspiracy movement?

Twitter said the 70,000-plus accounts were sharing QAnon content at scale; the sweep began the same day it permanently suspended the sitting president's account.

In which US city was Twitter, Inc. headquartered?

Twitter was headquartered in San Francisco, in the art-deco former furniture mart at 1355 Market Street in the Mid-Market district; X vacated the building in 2024.

Twitter's vowel-less code name twttr copied the spelling style of which website?

Flickr's missing-vowel spelling, along with the five-character length of US SMS short codes, shaped the code name; the twitter.com domain was only bought about six months after launch.

Which web framework was Twitter's web interface originally built on?

Ruby on Rails ran Twitter's early site, but its growing pains pushed Twitter to move back-end work to languages running on the Java Virtual Machine.

What wintry name did Twitter give the internal service that generates its tweet IDs?

Snowflake packs a timestamp into each 64-bit tweet ID, so IDs roughly sort by posting time, which is how Twitter and most apps order tweets.

Twitter's 2015 'Moments' feature let users do what?

Moments let users 'Curate tweets into a collection' with a cover and title; it was first reserved for Twitter's editorial team and partners before opening to everyone in September 2016.

Which US agency joined the Justice Department in fining Twitter $150 million in 2022 over ad targeting?

The FTC said Twitter used contact details it collected to secure accounts to help advertisers, and the settlement required new privacy safeguards.