Twitter two factor authentication and Vodafone

[Wicksta1]

Hi all,

I'm a new Vodafone customer after being on Three for many years. A couple of months ago I got a new job at a competitor to my old company and was put on gardening leave for the duration of my notice at my old job and locked out of my email for obvious reasons. At the same time I moved my number to Vodafone (the Three contract was paid for by my old company and they allowed me to keep the number) and this is where I started having problems.

My Twitter account has 2 factor SMS authentication set on it, so when I log in I should get a code sent to me via SMS. Vodafone numbers don't appear to get this SMS so now I am completely locked out of my Twitter account - the email registered to it is my old work email (it's a personal Twitter account) and because of this despite me knowing the password, owning the number assigned to the 2FA I can't log in now I have moved to Vodafone.

Google searches tell me this is a common theme with Vodafone worldwide:

https://grahamcluley.com/2015/05/twitter-spat-vodafone-2fa/

It seems the only way I can get back into my Twitter account is by changing mobile networks, which seems absolutely crazy. Twitter won't budge because I (admittedly stupidly not thinking) no longer have access to the email address on the account - I just assumed my SMS authentication would continue to work.

Has anyone else had the same problem, and if so how did you solve this without moving away from Vodafone?

[Wicksta1]

Nabs, I'm PAYM as well, I ported from O2 last year (work phone at old job, they let me keep the number) to Three PAYG to try them out before moving to Vodafone PAYM.

Maybe my quick succession of network changes has caused some confusion for certain SMS messages. Your reply has given me some hope!

[Nabs]

hmm.. it's definitely a strange one!

I wonder if Twitter still thinks your number is registered at Three (they are on the list of carriers that support SMS notifications) and somehow that's screwing things up at their end...

The other issue is that we don't actually know when the message is coming from, by that I mean i've got no idea who Twitter use as their SMS provider. Without that information its going tobe near on impossible for Vodafone to look for any missing messages for your account.

Not sure if you have tried already but it may be worth getting in touch with Twitter themselves, worst case they can't help but best case they may be able to reset the security on your account so you can set up with a new email address and reconfigure 2FA, no harm in trying... They have a dedicated form for login issues https://support.twitter.com/forms/signin

[Wicksta1]

Unfortuntely hey won't entertain any correspondance via that link because I don't have access to my old company email address. They just close the cases.

A bit annoying when I have the credentials for the account along with the msisdn!

[Nabs]

Oh no, that's annoying!

I'm running out of suggestions now... 😞

Would your old employer be willing to forward the email to you? I appreciate this could be an awkward approach so might not be an option.

The only other thing I can think of is if there was some kind of 'hacked account' approach you could take to get twitter to correct the details, highly unlikely though.

To be honest I'm quite disappointed twitter don't have mechanisms in place to deal with situations like this