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Twitter is a microblogging and social networking service owned by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, while unregistered users only have a limited ability to read public tweets. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile frontend software, or programmatically via its APIs. Prior to April 2020, services were accessible via SMS. Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but the limit was doubled to 280 for non-CJK languages in November 2017. Audio and video tweets remain limited to 140 seconds for most accounts.
Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 and launched in July of that year. Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California and has more than 25 offices around the world. By 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet". By the start of 2019, Twitter had more than 330 million monthly active users. In practice, the vast majority of tweets are written by a minority of users.A major häçk of Twitter on July 15, 2020, affected 130 high-profile accounts, both verified and unverified ones such as Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk; the häçk allowed bitcoin scammers to send tweets via the compromised accounts that asked the followers to send bitcoin to a given public address, with the promise to double their money. Within a few hours, Twitter disabled tweeting and reset passwords from all verified accounts. Analysis of the event revealed that the scammers had used social engineering to obtain credentials from Twitter employees to access an administration tool used by Twitter to view and change these accounts' personal details as to gain access as part of a "smash and grab" attempt to make money quickly, with an estimated US$120,000 in bitcoin deposited in various accounts before Twitter intervened. Several law enforcement entities including the FBI launched investigations into the attack to determine the perpetrators over concerns of broader implications of such a häçk in the future.On April 25, 2022, the Twitter board of directors agreed to a $44 billion buyout by Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, potentially making it one of the biggest deals to turn a company private. Musk said on July 8, 2022, that he was terminating the deal, claiming that the social media company had failed to provide information about fake accounts on the platform. Twitter board chair Bret Taylor subsequently pledged to pursue legal action against Musk, launching a lawsuit against him in the Chancery Court of Delaware on July 12.

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