X (Twitter) account locked or suspended? What it means, what to do

X uses the three words for different things, and its help page treats each one differently. What you see when you log in tells you which you have:

The login messages are the wording X's help gives; the visitor warnings and the suspended errors are from X's app. A limit can hide you from search, which looks like what people call a shadowban: are you shadowbanned on X?

1. 1

   Log in

   Log in on x.com or in the app. If you can't log in at all, X's help says to contact its support team.

2. 2

   Follow the message

   Select Start. X then asks for a phone number, which it will "associate" with your account, and sends a code by text or call; or it emails you a code; or it runs a reCAPTCHA check in the background. Enter the code and select Submit or Verify, or, after the reCAPTCHA, Continue to X.

3. 3

   If X thinks you were hacked

   A lock "for security purposes" means X "detected suspicious behavior, and it appears as though your account may have been compromised." The message tells you how to secure the account by changing your password. If your account has an email address, X sends the instructions there too, so check your spam folder.

Lost the phone or email on the account? X says to contact support, and warns: "Sometimes the only option in this situation is to create a new account." If you think the lock was a mistake, X says you can appeal through its support team.

While your account is locked, X removes it "from follower counts, Reposts, and Likes", so the follower counts of the people you follow may go down. Once it's unlocked, X's help says "it can sometimes take up to 24 hours or so for follower and following counts to return to normal."

X describes three kinds of limit, and each lasts until a countdown runs out:

• For aggressive following or engagement, such as likes, reposts and quotes: your features are limited "for a specified time, which varies based on the nature of the violation." You can wait, or verify a phone number or email to end it sooner, though after repeated violations X may not offer the phone option. Meanwhile your account and posts "may be filtered out of certain places on X, including from search results and notifications."
• For behaviour that may break the X Rules or "inhibit other people's ability to express themselves freely": this "could mean only your followers are able see your activity on X". The countdown starts when you select Continue to X.
• For a possible breach of the X Rules, read-only: "you can still browse X, but while in this state, you can only send Direct Messages to your followers. You will not be able to engage in actions such as posting, reposting, or liking, and only your followers can see your past posts." X may first ask you to verify your email, add a phone number or delete posts.

If you think a limit is a mistake, X says you can appeal "by contacting our support team". It also warns: "Repeat violations of the X Rules may lead to permanent suspension." What counts as following too fast is in X's follow limits.

X requires users to be at least 13, and locks accounts that its records say are younger, or younger than local law allows:

• Signed up before 13: X lets you restore the account once you're old enough, by deleting the posts, likes and DMs from before you were 13, your profile details other than your handle and date of birth, and the Moments, Lists and collections you saved. Your followers and the people you follow stay. It "can take up to 72 hours", and once you're eligible you have 30 days to start, "after which, you'll no longer be able to regain access to your account."
• In countries where the law requires a parent's consent for teenagers over 13 but under the local age of consent, X locks such an account until a parent or guardian fills in a form. X requires "proof of identification and guardianship", and it "can take up to 60 days to process".
• Since 10 December 2025, you must be at least 16 to use X in Australia. X checks age with what it already knows, a live selfie or a government ID, and an account under 16 stays locked until its owner is 16. If X guessed wrong, the lockout notice has the instructions to verify your age.

Changing your birth date can set this off. In November 2020 Twitter said that if a birth date is changed to one under 13 and "our systems identify content posted by the account before they were 13 years old, they will be locked out of the account." That month the US immigration agency ICE locked itself out this way. X's app now warns that the date "can only be changed a few times. Make sure you enter the age of the person using the account."

X's other age checks, required by laws including those of the UK, Ireland, the EU and Australia, test an age such as 18 for some content: a user estimated to be under 18 gets sensitive-media settings and can challenge the estimate through X's support.

1. 1

   Try the prompts first

   If you log in and X asks for a phone number or to confirm your email, X's help says to "follow the instructions to get your account unsuspended."

2. 2

   Stay logged in to the suspended account

   The appeal is tied to the account you're logged in to. Logged out, X's form says: "You are not currently logged into a suspended X account."

3. 3

   Open the form in a new tab

   X's instruction: "First, log in to the account that is suspended. Then, open a new browser tab and file an appeal." The form is Appeal a locked or suspended account. Say why you think X made a mistake.

In the EU, the Digital Services Act adds certified out-of-court dispute bodies. X's page says it "is not bound by any decision" they make, and in its report for January to June 2026 it said it had implemented none of their decisions.

Paying doesn't change any of this. X's Premium page says enforcement on subscribers "will continue to be handled by existing enforcement teams, under the current review process." And a new account isn't a way around a suspension: X's rules forbid ban evasion, and X can suspend any other account it believes the same person runs in violation of the suspension, "regardless of when the other account was created." You may run "up to ten (10) accounts for different, non-duplicative purposes".

X publishes appeal numbers for the EU in its Digital Services Act reports:

That isn't a clean trend: X changed its report format in mid-2025, its appeal counts grew fivefold, and it rewrote its July to December 2025 numbers after publishing them. In the latest report, the median appeal was decided in 35 hours. X's row doesn't give the unit, but the EU's rules for these reports require hours.

X's report for Japan counts appeals too: from April 2025 to March 2026 it granted 41,796 of 2,025,622 appeals against account suspensions, or 2.1%. It's a different law and a 12-month period, so it doesn't compare with the EU rows.

Mistakes also come in batches. In March 2026 users reported a wave of suspensions for "inauthentic behaviors". On 13 March, Nikita Bier, then X's head of product, wrote that "a new spam filter had falsely tagged subset of accounts" for about 12 hours, and that "99% of those suspensions were reverted today."

X lists three of the reasons for a suspension: spam, an account it suspects was hacked, and abusive posts or behaviour. On spam it says: "Most of the accounts we suspend are suspended because they are spammy, or just plain fake". It also says: "Sometimes a real person's account gets suspended by mistake".

Inauthentic behaviour falls under X's authenticity policy, which covers fake and automated accounts, spam, and running several accounts to boost each other. It is behind almost all the suspensions X makes on its own initiative: 97.5% of them in the EU from January to June 2026. Some of what it lists:

• "follow churn", "following and then unfollowing large numbers of accounts in an effort to inflate one's own follower count";
• "indiscriminate following", "following and/or unfollowing a large number of unrelated accounts in a short time period, particularly by automated means";
• "sending bulk, aggressive, high-volume unsolicited replies, mentions, or direct messages";
• exchanging likes, reposts or follows, or paying for them;
• automated or scripted accounts that don't follow X's developer policy, including through an app you connected: "as a user you are ultimately responsible for third-party applications you may authorize to access or use your account."

X gives no length for a suspension. "For severe violations, accounts will be permanently suspended at first detection." For a first offence it may instead require "deletion of one or more posts" or lock the account for a while, and if you broke the rules with several accounts, "you may be asked to choose one account to keep."

A locked account leaves other people's counts: X removes it from the follower counts of everyone it follows, and from the Reposts and Likes it gave, until it's unlocked. That's one reason a count can drop without anyone unfollowing: why you lose followers on X.

For suspensions, X's help doesn't say either way. What we see in the follower lists we read: a suspended account drops out of the lists of the people it followed, and a few come back later. Of the 2,266 suspended followers we recorded between May and October 2026, 62 have followed again since.

Spam runs through the whole history, from a 2011 study to a spam filter's mistake in 2026, with age rules and Musk's polls in between:

If X suspends one of your followers, our DM and your dashboard say they "got suspended", not that they unfollowed you. If they follow you again within 40 days, the alert reads "got unsuspended and follows you again". When the lookup tells us nothing about an account, we can't tell, and it shows as an unfollow.

If your own account is suspended or deactivated, checks pause and your dashboard reads "Your X account is unavailable". We look again later in case it comes back. X's security locks we don't see at all, on your account or your followers': a follower X locked usually shows as an unfollow.