(Disclosure right up front: <\/em>SB Nation is part of Vox Media, and so is <\/em>The Verge; we\u2019re all co-workers and friends. I reported this story mostly by talking to my colleagues.)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n SB Nation<\/em>\u2019s Twitter account has a little over 300,000 followers. Or, at least, it did last Friday. Then, suddenly, it was gone, disappeared from the internet for almost a week. When you go to the profile page, the account was replaced by an ominous message: \u201cThis account doesn\u2019t exist.\u201d Nobody at SB Nation<\/em> knew how to get it back \u2014 and for a while, nobody at Twitter did, either.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Last Friday, an SB Nation<\/em> employee tried to log in to the @sbnation account. They were doing so in order to follow @cutwaterspirits, the Twitter account for Cutwater, an adult beverage company that was also sponsoring some SB Nation <\/em>content. (Following sponsors is pretty normal, especially when you\u2019re going to be tweeting co-branded content.)\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When they logged in, they were hit with a prompt: add a birthday to your account \u2014 which was weird because this is SB Nation<\/em>, and SB Nation<\/em> is not a person and doesn\u2019t have a birthday. So the employee did what just about anyone would do in that situation: picked something at random. They added 1\/1\/2000 as the birthday and hit save, and that was the last time anyone saw the @sbnation Twitter account.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I was able to recreate the situation by logging into a long-dormant account of mine and then attempting to follow Cutwater. Or Jack Daniel\u2019s. Or Budweiser or Stella Artois or most other adult-beverage companies I could think of. As soon as I clicked \u201cFollow,\u201d a window came up that told me to update my profile. \u201cTo follow this account, you\u2019ll need to include your birth date on your profile, ensuring you meet minimum age requirements.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019d run into a Twitter feature called \u201cage screening<\/a>,\u201d which the company created in 2012 as a way to make it easier for alcohol companies and the like to advertise on Twitter. The screening really only had one step: new followers have to prove they\u2019re of age by adding their birth date to their profile.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Age screening really only has one step: new followers have to prove they\u2019re of age by adding their birth date to their profile<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The account I used had been created on June 13th, 2009. When I added a birth date that would have made me over 13 at that time \u2014\u00a0I picked May of 1995, so I would have been 14 \u2014\u00a0it let me add my birthday and then follow all the liquor brands I could find. But when I went back and changed my birthday to January 1st, 2000, as soon as I hit save, I was locked out of my account. \u201cOur Terms of Service require everyone who uses Twitter to be 13 or older,\u201d the page read, \u201cand we have determined that you did not meet the minimum age requirement at the time this account was created.\u201d I had apparently violated Twitter\u2019s age guidelines<\/a> 14 years ago and was getting my retribution now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I was directed to a form that asked for my full name, my email address, and a picture of my driver\u2019s license. I submitted all that and got a response that said my request had been received. \u201cWe typically respond within a few days, but some cases can take a little longer.\u201d By the next morning, my account had been restored.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In the meantime, though, my account said the same thing SB Nation<\/em>\u2019s did: \u201cThis account doesn\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This should, in theory, be a relatively straightforward problem. There\u2019s a form to fill out and everything! Plus, unlike my old account and its 21 followers, SB Nation<\/em> even has contacts at Twitter, the folks who run partnerships with companies like Vox Media. \u201cI didn\u2019t have a real thought on what caused it,\u201d says Jermaine Spradley, SB Nation<\/em>\u2019s publisher. \u201cIt was just more like, this has to be something that\u2019s fixable pretty fast.\u201d People have been getting locked out of their accounts forever, and Twitter always seemingly had a switch to flip it back on. Twitter told the SB Nation<\/em> team it was working on it and then promptly went silent for almost a week.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It was a tough week for a sports blog to have its flagship account locked, too. The Final Four took over the weekend, especially the women\u2019s final. It was opening weekend for Major League Baseball. The NBA playoff race was heating up. The Masters was coming soon. It\u2019s just a great time on the sports calendar and a hard one to be locked out of Sports Twitter. The publication has lots of other Twitter accounts, so it hasn\u2019t been completely shut out of the platform, but it hurt to lose the flagship.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n