Imagine signing onto Twitter to fire off a couple responses to @realDonaldTrump's latest 140-character missive. Immediately, you start getting a ton of likes and replies, but within several hours, the entire conversation just...evaporates into thin air.

What happened?

Whether in support or in anger, those taking the time to tweet at Trump are now seeing this glitch happen all the time. Users' tweets are increasingly being "orphaned" or "disconnected" from the original thread.

The bug has caused some users to worry that the White House, Trump's supporters, or Twitter's employees could be censoring their messages to the president.

But as exciting as a conspiracy to censor feedback about Twitter's most notorious user could be, the likely reality is something far less sinister. Twitter's technical infrastructure is breaking under the power of Trump's tweets—causing an old product bug to rear its ugly head.

"Was it a problem before? Yes," said Leslie Miley, senior engineering manager at Twitter from 2012 to 2015. But Twitter is "probably seeing strains in their architecture that they do not anticipate because Donald Trump, for lack of a better term, is a black swan."

Some ppl complaining that unflattering replies to @realDonaldTrump, are getting 'disconnected' from his tweet but they are not blocked. How? — Suryanarayan Ganesh (@gsurya) January 20, 2017

The glitch works by ripping apart tweets in a thread, disrupting the development of threaded conversations. The responses no longer appear as replies, only as stand-alone tweets on each individual user's profile.

Why is this such a big deal? Easy: When a tweet becomes disconnected, it's only going to garner a small fraction of the views and engagements it would've had it been unaffected by the bug, and attached to a Trump tweet.

It's also why some users are worried their messages are being intentionally suppressed.

Replies to @realDonaldTrump are being disconnected by @Twitter CENSORSHIP IS ALIVE — misty shakleford (@Migs_n_Squiggs) February 7, 2017

If a tweet's viewed after it's been orphaned, it looks as if it were never a reply, confusing both the original author of the tweet, as well as other users who engage with it.

"It's like the tweet is marked with a flag and essentially killed off," AJ Joshi, a user whose tweets to Trump are regularly disconnected said.

For example, on February 7, at 7:11 a.m., Donald Trump tweeted, "I don't know Putin, have no deals in Russia, and the haters are going crazy - yet Obama can make a deal with Iran, #1 in terror, no problem!"

Eleven minutes later, Joshi replied with a clip from a 2013 interview with MSNBC's Thomas Roberts where Trump explains that he does have a relationship with the Russian president.

The problem is that Joshi's reply doesn't look like a reply at all. It lives alone on his profile, and doesn't appear as though it was originally a response to the president.

Joshi says that many of the tweets he's fired off in response to Trump have become disconnected within several hours.

The #Trump Team now report and disconnect all tweets they don't agree with, freedom of speech is lost. cc @Jack @Twitter @Sacca pic.twitter.com/kqVO0G8Zq6 — AJ Joshi (@AJ) January 22, 2017

Along with a group of other dissidents who regularly tweet at Trump, Joshi has speculated that their replies become orphaned because Trump's supporters are reporting them to Twitter as abuse.

The rationale is that Twitter might have a mechanism which disconnects tweets after they're flagged by enough users.

In other words, the thought is that Trump's supporters are abusing the very same mechanisms Twitter's created to help curb abuse, as a way to silence those who don't agree with what the president says.

And as Joshi's demonstrated, flagging tweets as abusive does have something to do with whether or not they become disconnected.

But Twitter doesn't have an automatic system that unlinks tweets reported en masse, a spokesperson clarified after publication.

More importantly, if anti-Trump censorship is really taking place, it doesn't explain why Trump's supporters also experience the same issue.

As user Mike Keen noted on Medium , replies that are in support of Trump also frequently find themselves “disconnected” from the Tweet in which they were originally sent in reply to.

A simple tweet Keen sent in support of the president now stands alone. It's no longer part of the much larger conversation in Trump's replies, but instead lives by itself on Keen's profile.

Keen's post was shared to the pro-Trump subreddit r/The_Donald, where dozens of users speculated whether Twitter was censoring pro-Trump tweets on purpose.

Little did they know that Trump dissenters were wondering the same thing about their own tweets.

While it's not clear if users are abusing Twitter's anti-harassment tools, those features could be exacerbating the problem by accident.

"When you think about enhanced muting, enhanced blocking, this all adds latency," Miley said. In other words, Twitter's newer tools to curb abuse could have the unintended consequence of also disconnecting more replies.

When we reached out to Twitter about the issue earlier this week, a Twitter spokesperson directed us to a page in the Help Center, which read:

"Are you looking for your @replies? If you’re not seeing your @reply listed below a user’s original Tweet, it’s because we are currently unable to show every reply to a given Tweet in that Tweet’s details. Rest assured that if your @reply is showing up in your timeline, the other user can see your @reply in their Mentions tab."

On Friday morning, Twitter Support tweeted the same Help Center page again, but the language in it had been tweaked.

"If you’re not seeing your reply below an original Tweet, it’s because we are currently unable to show every reply to a given Tweet. This can happen when a popular Tweet receives a high number of replies. However if your reply is showing up in your timeline, the Tweet author can, in most cases, view your reply in their Notifications." (emphasis ours)

Not seeing your reply to a Tweet? This can happen when a popular Tweet has a high volume of replies: https://t.co/oicqDmyCgM — Twitter Support (@Support) February 10, 2017

A Twitter spokesperson had declined Thursday to comment on the record further or put an engineer on the phone about the matter.

But further press attention brought them to a breaking point of addressing the issue. Marketing Land’s Danny Sullivan tweet about the problem, prompting a response from Twitter’s VP of Engineering Ed Ho.

@dannysullivan @jack it's due to the high number of replies, long standing technical issue, we are working on a fix — Ed Ho (@mrdonut) February 10, 2017

The problem, according to Ho, relates to overcapacity. That means the number of replies a tweet receives causes the ordering of the thread to become messed up.

If someone replies to a tweet quickly, and therefore generates a lot of corresponding replies, they can become unlinked to the original tweet, making it impossible to see the replies both on mobile and desktop.

As Ho tweets and Miley confirmed, it’s a “long standing technical issue.”

But it seems that traction related to Trump is elevating the problem.

Donald Trump has more than 24 million followers, but plenty of celebrities and politicians have considerably more, yet don't cause the glitch to occur.

For example, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Barack Obama each trump @realDonaldTrump in followers, by least 30 million each. The issue is these accounts don't receive nearly as many replies.

Katy’s recent tweet about her new song garnered a measly 1,900 replies. Meanwhile, Trump’s latest tweet on the “failing @nytimes” had more than 16,000 replies at the time of publication. His “SEE YOU IN COURT” tweet from Thursday night received 141,000 replies.

Almost anything he says receives tens of thousands of replies within 24 hours, causing Twitter's product to reach capacity. Thus, dozens of tweets become disconnected.

Some users are experiencing the glitch on other accounts, like that of Kellyanne Conway, the Counselor to the President, and Sean Spicer, the White House Press Secretary. Both accounts receive far fewer replies than Trump himself does, indicating they might trigger the glitch less often.

It wouldn't be the first time that a particular account was putting a strain on Twitter's product, either. In the past, the company's actually allocated dedicated servers to deal with the traffic a single account can generate.

"Twitter is a real-time system so what you see and what you think you reply to is not necessarily what the system is going to end up displaying because there are millions of people interacting with the service at any time," Miley explained.

In other words, the more users engaging with a tweet, the worse the disconnecting problem can get. Twitter adding more users and encouraging them to tweet actually created this problem and makes the service even more confusing.

Imagine being a new user who joined Twitter to tweet at President Trump, only to find your tweet disconnected.

As for what's being done about it? As Ho tweeted, Twitter is "working on a fix." For what it's worth, it looks like all replies to Ho, of course, are working just fine.

UPDATE: Feb. 10, 2017, 5:16 p.m. EST This article has been updated with additional information from Twitter.