Twitter Spaces ‘Back’ After Less Than 24-Hour Shutdown, Elon Musk Says

The feature was deactivated on Thursday shortly after the billionaire exited a conversation with journalists suspended from the platform

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The Twitter Spaces function is back online after being deactivated for less than 24 hours.

The feature, which allows users to host and join live audio chat rooms, went offline Thursday evening shortly after Twitter CEO Elon Musk briefly joined a Spaces conversation involving several journalists who were suspended from the platform.

But Friday night, Musk reversed course and tweeted, “Spaces is back.”

Prior to the suspensions, the journalists tweeted about the company’s decision to suspend @ElonJet, an account created by 19-year-old University of Central Florida student Jack Sweeney that uses ADS-B exchange data to track Musk’s private jet movements.

Musk claimed in a tweet that the accounts were suspended for posting “my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service.”

“Same doxxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else,” he added.

Musk said in a tweet late Thursday night that a “legacy bug” in Spaces was being fixed and that it “should be working” on Friday.

Leah Culver, a senior software engineer on the Twitter Spaces team, apologized in a Friday afternoon tweet for Spaces being taken offline.

“I wasn’t personally involved in the decision and hopefully Spaces will be back soon,” Culver added.

Katie Notopoulos, a technology reporter at BuzzFeed who hosted the Twitter Spaces conversation with the journalists, was temporarily banned from using the Spaces feature due to a “rules violation.” On Saturday, she said the ban had been “magically lifted.”

“I emailed Twitter last night for info but never got a response,” she added. “My hunch is it’s a technical quirk related to the loophole that let in suspended users.”

Some of the journalists have since had their Twitter accounts reinstated, while others remain in limbo.

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