How one Twitter account disappeared for a week — and why nobody knew how to fix it

(Disclosure right up front: SB Nation is part of Vox Media, and so is The Verge; we’re all co-workers and friends. I reported this story mostly by talking to my colleagues.)

SB Nation’s Twitter account has a little over 300,000 followers. Or, at least, it did last Friday. Then, suddenly, it was gone, disappeared from the internet for almost a week. When you go to the profile page, the account was replaced by an ominous message: “This account doesn’t exist.” Nobody at SB Nation knew how to get it back — and for a while, nobody at Twitter did, either.

Last Friday, an SB Nation employee tried to log in to the @sbnation account. They were doing so in order to follow @cutwaterspirits, the Twitter account for Cutwater, an adult beverage…

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