Latest 'Recent' twitters have gone missing!

Same happened to me. However, after posting a tweet myself new tweets started to come in. It didn't bring back the missing tweets though.

The same thing is happening to me.
Everything from Sunday and beyond keeps disappearing.
When I try updating, it shows up initially, but disappears a few minutes later.
I re-load the page, hoping everything will be there, but it's simply gone.
The same thing is happening with the twitter widget on my blog. The updates show up initially, but disappear awhile later.
Very frustrating.

At least four tweets have gone missing in the past 12 hours.

Yes... I've been having this problem all day; it's horrible. Tweets will show up, and then go away. And SMS tweets show up sometimes, and other times don't post for hours and hours on end, so they end up being all out of order and RATHER confusing to followers.

I notice four replies, all of which report the same experience I had. The next big question is how this can be reported to Twitter support. I saw no link other than to 'Help' (which is useless here).

The team is aware of the problem:

See:
http://status.twitter.com/

This is ridiculous. What is the point of posting an update if it just disappears an hour later? If it doesn't get fixed soon, Twitter will be dumped.

Well that's certainly true. Well it is partially because updates do appear if you go to someone's profile and check for updates there.

But that totally defeats the point of Twitter, so I'd agree that updates virtually disappear since we can't see them on our combined personal timeline.

This is just speculation on my part, but I think it's related to the latest wave of 6figure spammers. There were 9 (that I know of) spambot accounts created in the last 24 hours and they've each been adding thousands of users.

The thing is... every time someone we follow posts an update, Twitter has to update our cache. Similarly, every time we follow, unfollow, or block someone, Twitter has to rebuild our account's cache so that our Recent stream contains the correct tweets.

So when those 9 (possibly more) spambots started following thousands of users in rapid succession, they were no doubt triggering thousands of cache refresh processes at the same time... which probably overwhelmed the system that keeps our Recent stream updated.

Again, this is just my guess, based on what little I understand of Twitter's setup. In any case, I'm hopeful it will get solved soon because from the looks of things, some of those spambots have already been disabled.