Twitter’s new ephemeral tweets, known as fleets, are supposed to last for only 24 hours. But a bug is causing fleets to not totally disappear, remaining accessible well past their expiration dates. First reported by TechCrunch, the bug allows fleets to be viewed and downloaded by other users, but without notifying the fleet’s author.
“We’re aware of a bug accessible through a technical workaround where some Fleets media URLs may be accessible after 24 hours,” a Twitter spokesperson said in an email to The Verge. “We are working on a fix that should be rolled out shortly.”
The “workaround” referenced appears to be a developer app that could scrape fleets from public accounts via Twitter’s API. The Twitter API doesn’t return URLs for fleets that are older than 24 hours, according to the company, and once the fix is rolled out, even if someone has a URL for active fleet, it won’t work after the expiration point.
And while fleets are only visible on…
