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That dormant account may be up for grabs soon as Twitter plans cleanup in December

One of the most annoying things to happen to anybody is looking to create a twitter account and finding out that your username is unavailable. It gets worse if you check the account to see that it is not even an active one.

However, things may be changing soon as reports say that Twitter has sent out emails to owners of inactive accounts with a warning to sign in by the 11th of December or their accounts will be removed and the username up for grabs again. People with accounts that have not signed in for more than six months will receive the email alert. 

A spokesperson for twitter explains that the move is part of the commitment by the company to serve the public conversation and that they are working to clean up inactive accounts to present more accurate, credible information that people can trust across twitter in line with the Inactive account policy.

However, if you are expecting a username rush to happen in December, you may still have to wait a while as the microblogging platform has not said exactly when recouped usernames would be made available to existing users.

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge


A move like this by a big online platform is not unusual as Yahoo launched a similar “account recycling” effort in 2013–although it was not without issues as some people who got inactive usernames ended up receiving emails for the old account holders.

Do you have an inactive username that you are looking to “obtain”?

Postscript: Twitter has confirmed that the move will only impact accounts in the EU only, for now and that they would look into ways of memorialising inactive accounts of the deceased. 

Opeyemi Olugbemiro

Your tech story amazes me. When you think of a tech innovation that makes life better, you've caught my attention. #SerialOptimist Contact: opeyemi@zumalo.com