Using a bad word on Twitter can earn you a quick suspension. But for several hours on Sunday, users were getting banned just for mentioning a certain city in Tennessee.
For some reason, Twitter started issuing automatic 12-hour bans to any user who tweeted the word “Memphis” – the company later said it was “due to a bug”.
Of course, Twitter being Twitter, people instantly began using this for evil – trying to bait people into saying “the M word” by asking questions about Tennessee’s 2nd-largest city, or Dutch soccer star Memphis Depay.
By Sunday evening, Twitter had fixed the glitch and restored all banned accounts – but didn’t offer any reason for the ban.
