Like many Twitter users, I have more than one Twitter account. But for me, the fragmentation was no longer worth it, and I am attempting to bring together all of my personas under the single brand of my name. With that, I was attempting to execute what has proven to be a difficult (if not impossible) task – deleting a Twitter account. Let me be clear by stating that I was not trying to delete my main Twitter account, but simply attempting to delete a secondary (or tertiary for all I can remember) account because of the aforementioned reasons. That is where the puzzlement began.

The account in question is one that I don’t use and, have not used and simply found no reason to continue to “hold” on to, but apparently parting with a Twitter account is more easily said than done.  Twitter makes it easy to find the account deletion options with a simple link entitled “Delete my account” on its Settings > Account tab.  That is where the fun began as when I clicked the link, I was presented with the following:

As seen by the error message above, “Twitter is stressing out a bit right now, so this feature is temporarily disabled.”  Or, taken another way… “We’d prefer that you’d stick with Twitter a bit longer, so we won’t allow you to delete your account right now, and hopefully you’ll forget in a few days time that you wanted to leave our service in the first place.”

What is interesting is that this is not even a hot topic, whether due to users simply not wanting to leave Twitter or because the users who do leave are simply orphaning their accounts.  Twitter’s Get Satisfaction page offers some insight into a deletion issue, but the last complaint was three months ago and that issue is not quite the same as I ran into at this point.

A quick search of Twitter itself find a handful of people running into the same issue of deletion as I did, and some of them are not as toned down as I am.  But the real question remains whether this is an issue that Twitter is aware of, is working on, and how high of a priority it is for a company/service that relies on a critical mass of users to fix an issue where those users wish remove their accounts from the service.