Twitter Trivia
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47 free Twitter trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Twitter trivia quiz covers the whole life of the bird app, from an SMS-based side project called twttr inside a podcasting company in 2006 to its rebranding as X. It asks who the four founders were, what the very first tweet said, why the limit was 140 characters and when it doubled, who invented the hashtag, why the logo was called Larry the Bird, and what the fail whale was. It also covers the records and moments that made the platform: Ashton Kutcher's race to a million followers, the Oscar selfie, the Japanese anime fans who set the tweets-per-second record, the Bronx Zoo cobra, the Pope's account, the 2013 IPO, Vine, Twitter Blue, Community Notes, and the $44 billion Elon Musk takeover with its rebrand, new CEO and move to x.com. Easy questions cover facts every user knows; hard ones go into founding-era detail and chart-topping retweets. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's articles on Twitter, its history and its acquisition, and each question quotes the sentence that supports it.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which live-streaming app did Twitter buy in 2015, before it had launched?
Periscope
Periscope launched in March 2015, but Twitter shut the app down in March 2021, citing declining usage and the rising cost of maintaining it.
Q 02In June 2009, Twitter postponed a network upgrade because protesters in which country were relying on it?
Iran
Iran's post-election protesters were using Twitter to reach the world, so the upgrade was moved to 1:30 a.m. Iranian time.
Q 03Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey also co-founded which payments company?
Square
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.
Q 04What did the very first tweet, posted by Jack Dorsey in March 2006, say?
just setting up my twttr
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.
Q 05Twitter grew out of a side project at which startup?
Odeo, a podcasting service
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.
Q 06What was Twitter's original character limit for a tweet?
140
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.
Q 07Which language kept the old tweet limit when Twitter moved to 280 in 2017?
Korean
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.
Q 08At which 2007 event did Twitter's popularity take off, winning it an award?
South by Southwest
South by Southwest turned Twitter into a hit, but the rush of new users that year left the young service notorious for its downtime.
Q 09Who introduced the hashtag to Twitter in 2007?
Chris Messina
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.
Q 10What was the error image shown during Twitter's early outages, with birds hoisting a sea creature?
The fail whale
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.
Q 11Live updates from which January 2008 keynote slowed Twitter to a crawl?
Steve Jobs at Macworld
Steve Jobs at Macworld was unveiling the MacBook Air, billed as the world's thinnest notebook, as the flood of live updates overwhelmed Twitter.
Q 12Twitter's first bird logo was clip art by British designer Simon Oxley, bought from which stock-image website?
iStockphoto
iStockphoto was also where GitHub found Oxley's drawing 'Octopuss', which it bought and renamed the Octocat.
Q 13Whose account was the first on Twitter to reach one million followers, in 2009?
Ashton Kutcher
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.
Q 21Which host's Oscars 'selfie' became the most retweeted image ever in March 2014?
Ellen DeGeneres
Ellen DeGeneres's selfie was actually taken by Bradley Cooper, and the rush to retweet it briefly crashed Twitter during the ceremony.
Q 22Which Japanese billionaire's New Year giveaway tweet became the most retweeted ever in January 2019?
Yusaku Maezawa
Yusaku Maezawa, founder of the online retailer Zozo, promised cash to people who retweeted it, overtaking Carter Wilkerson's 2017 record tweet.
Q 23What was Twitter's 'fleets' feature, launched worldwide in November 2020?
Posts that vanished after 24 hours
Q 14Which baseball manager's lawsuit over an impersonator helped prompt the 2009 launch of Verified Accounts?
Tony La Russa
Twitter denied settling Tony La Russa's suit over a fake account, and in the same June 2009 post previewed its Verified Accounts beta.
Q 15In January 2010, who posted the first unassisted tweet from off Earth?
A NASA astronaut on the ISS
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.
Q 16Which escaped animal got a hit parody Twitter account during its week on the loose in March 2011?
A Bronx Zoo cobra
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.
Q 17What handle did Pope Benedict XVI use when he joined Twitter in December 2012?
@pontifex
@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.
Q 18What was Vine, launched by Twitter in 2013?
A short-video service
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.
Q 19Who claimed responsibility for hijacking the AP's account in April 2013 and briefly moving the stock market?
The Syrian Electronic Army
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.
Q 20Fans of which Studio Ghibli film set the record for most tweets in one second in August 2013?
Castle in the Sky
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.
Fleets were 'Posts that vanished after 24 hours', which Twitter hoped would coax more people into posting.
Q 24What did Twitter launch as Spaces in 2021?
A live-audio conversation feature
Spaces, a live-audio conversation feature, took on Clubhouse, and Twitter announced ticketed rooms so hosts could charge listeners to join.
Q 25What did the hijacked tweets in July 2020's hack of Obama's and Gates's accounts urge?
Send bitcoin to double their money
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.
Q 26What was the original name of the fact-checking programme renamed Community Notes in 2022?
Birdwatch
Birdwatch began in January 2021 as a small pilot in which ordinary users, not Twitter staff, wrote context notes on misleading tweets.
Q 27Which decentralised social network began in 2019 as a research project funded by Twitter?
Bluesky
Bluesky began as a small team Jack Dorsey funded to build open, decentralised standards that could change how Twitter itself hosts content.
Q 28What was the paid subscription that became X Premium called when it launched in June 2021?
Twitter Blue
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.
Q 29How much did Elon Musk pay to acquire Twitter in October 2022?
US$44 billion
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.
Q 30After becoming a major Twitter shareholder in April 2022, what did Musk accept, then decline?
Board seat
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.