Today is the day I was assaulted by Twitter

Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean Twitter is being reported to the police or anything. But I am this close.

I’ve been harassed all day by Twitter’s SMS notifications service, receiving around 2,500 text messages since 7:00am. First thing I tried to do was text “STOP”, and “QUIT” to silence the alerts. Tried “OFF”. To no avail. I am trying now (7+ hours later) and the messages still keep on rolling in AFTER the confirmation message from Twitter.

I believe that in the past few days Twitter has successfully renegotiated with Rogers Wireless in Canada, and SMS notifications have been turned back on after being silenced for almost a year. For some reason, all attempts by me to stop these notifications have not worked. There are also no other accounts linked to my phone number other than “brian_wong”.

The worst part? When I try to turn notifications off in the “devices” tab in my settings page, the “page does not exist”. Same thing goes with resetting the entire thing.

I’ve posted an official support ticket almost 7 hours ago, and I have gotten no response. My phone has also become unusable in the process. I’ve been inundated with hundreds of texts per hour and notifications get in the way of me doing anything.

I don’t know what to feel. I feel paralyzed, I can’t answer phone calls because the notifications get in the way and ultimately make it impossible for me to hang up (I rely on the other person to hang up). I need to clear out my text messages once in a while to make sure that my memory doesn’t get destroyed by thousands of text messages coming in.

I don’t know what to do. Twitter, please help.

Update (May 7th, 2009): Called Rogers to turn off my text messages until midnight. Text messages were then re-enabled. Assault continued. I’ve found a way to stop the text messages – I need to “silence” the alerts during the set period of time in the devices tab. This doesn’t solve the problem if it’s set from midnight to midnight, however. There needs to be at least 1 hour of active time for it to work. Still no reply on Twitter’s support request.