Twitter is a microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with

messages known as "tweets", owned by American company Twitter, Inc. Registered users can post,
like, and retweet tweets, however, unregistered users have the ability to only read tweets that are
publicly available. Users interact with Twitter through browser or mobile frontend software, or
programmatically via its APIs. Prior to April 2020, services were accessible via SMS.[9] Tweets
were originally restricted to 140 characters, but the limit was doubled to 280 for non-CJK languages
in November 2017.[10] Audio and video tweets remain limited to 140 seconds for most accounts.

Twitter was created by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 and
launched in July of that year. Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California and has more than
25 offices around the world.[11] By 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a
day,[12] and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day.[13][14][15] In
2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the
Internet".[16] By the start of 2019, Twitter had more than 330 million monthly active users.[17] In
practice, the vast majority of tweets are written by a minority of users.[18][19]

On April 25, 2022, the Twitter board of directors agreed to a $44 billion buyout by Elon Musk, the
CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, potentially making it one of the biggest deals to turn a company private.
[20][21] Musk said on July 8, 2022, that he was terminating the deal, claiming that the social media
company had failed to provide information about fake accounts on the platform.[22] Twitter board
chair Bret Taylor subsequently pledged to pursue legal action against Musk, launching a lawsuit
against him in the Chancery Court of Delaware on July 12.[23]