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Update, 4/27: Twitter has now officially announced that they are killing off SMS in most countries. The Verge covers the story as well.

View alternate options for receiving DansDeals alerts here. We are currently looking into other options for SMS alerts.

@jack @Twitter You're contradicting yourself. If SMS is insecure, then why use it for 2FA and account verification? And if posting tweets via SMS is a security problem, why not allow people to continue getting SMS push notifications of new Tweets? — DansDeals (@DansDeals) April 27, 2020

Originally posted on 4/25:

On Thursday evening, Twitter killed their Twitter for SMS option without providing any advance warning.

For more than 11 years, thousands of DansDeals readers have been getting SMS alerts of new deals via the service.

In fact the @DansDeals Twitter follower count fell from about 97,000 to below 89,000 as Twitter apparently removed the followers who signed up for DansDeals SMS alerts via their fast-follow SMS service that didn’t require a full Twitter account.

There are other options to get alerts, but those options require a smartphone. Twitter appears to be writing off non-smartphone users and users that just don’t want another app on their phones.

Several DansDeals readers complained to Twitter and Twitter confirmed that they discontinued the service in most countries (Click to enlarge):

Twitter claims that the service was discontinued due to service vulnerabilities, presumably trying to stop from cell phone spoofers and hijackers from posting Tweets that aren’t from the account owner.

Of course if that’s a major problem, then offering 2FA logins and password verification via cell phone wouldn’t make much sense either.

They also could have continued to allow SMS notifications to be received, without the ability to actually post Tweets via Twitter for SMS.

I’d guess that this is a cost-cutting move, as it’s much cheaper to offer push notifications from their app than it is to send out SMS.

Twitter can of course do what it wants, but the most egregious part of this is that they offered no warning that the service would be discontinued. That leaves websites like this one left without the ability to find alternate solutions for readers that were counting on the service.

If you were using Twitter for SMS to receive notifications from DansDeals, please see this post for alternate options, including Twitter app notifications, Telegram app notifications, and desktop or mobile browser notifications.

Did you count on Twitter SMS notifications?

Please spread the word to friends and family that they can download the Twitter App and enable push notifications as explained in this post, in order to keep notifications of great deals!