The idea behind Twitter is to allow users to make quick and short status updates, as opposed to sharing lengthy blog posts. This is why the character limit imposed by Twitter is still active as of today, but it seems that recently a couple of Twitter users Timraseett and HackneyYT discovered a bug/loophole that allowed them to post more than 140-characters.
As you can see in the image above, it seems that the trick that they used involved posting a bunch of random characters that was formatted as a URL, resulting a tweet that exceeded the 140-character limit, and for some reason it was also ignored by Twitter’s automatic link shortening tool.
Unsurprisingly Twitter did not take too kindly to these users exploiting the bug, and temporarily suspended both users and deleted the tweet. In a statement made to Gizmodo, Twitter confirmed that they have since made changes to prevent this from happening again, as well as reminding users that they should not mess with Twitter’s system, unless they are participating in Twitter’s bounty program.
That being said, Twitter has been slowly increasing the number of characters users can tweet, such as by no longer counting usernames towards the character limit. The company is also testing out allowing 280-character tweets, but whether or not this will become a permanent feature remains to be seen.