Credit: Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
- Elon Musk disabled specific microservices at Twitter, which likely included Twitter SMS 2FA.
- If you used text messages to prove your identity when logging into Twitter, you wouldn’t be able to do that when you log back in, essentially locking you out of your account. However, it appears the issue is starting to get fixed.
- Other 2FA methods, such as using an authenticator app, still worked.
Update, November 14, 2022 (06:25 PM ET): It looks like this service is slowly coming back up. Over the past hour, there have been reports on Twitter that users who were unable to use SMS 2FA can now use it again. We also tested setting up SMS 2FA anew and it worked. However, there are still a ton of reports of people facing issues currently as well as others who hit a wall of how many SMS they could send (even though none were actually sent). This triggers a protocol that prevents you from requesting new SMS codes for 24 hours, essentially locking you out of your account for that time.
It is still advisable to change your 2FA method from SMS to something else, or at least add an additional 2FA layer.