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49 free Twitter trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Twitter trivia quiz covers the whole life of the bird app, from an SMS-based side project called twttr inside a podcasting company in 2006 to its rebranding as X. It asks who the four founders were, what the very first tweet said, why the limit was 140 characters and when it doubled, who invented the hashtag, why the logo was called Larry the Bird, and what the fail whale was. It also covers the records and moments that made the platform: Ashton Kutcher's race to a million followers, the Oscar selfie, the Japanese anime fans who set the tweets-per-second record, the Bronx Zoo cobra, the Pope's account, the 2013 IPO, Vine, Twitter Blue, Community Notes, and the $44 billion Elon Musk takeover with its rebrand, new CEO and move to x.com. Easy questions cover facts every user knows; hard ones go into founding-era detail and chart-topping retweets. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia's articles on Twitter, its history and its acquisition, and each question quotes the sentence that supports it.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which year was Twitter created and publicly launched?
2006
Twitter launched in 2006: the first tweet went out on March 21 and the service opened to the public on July 15 that year.
Q 02What was the service's original five-letter code name?
twttr
The code name was 'twttr', the vowels dropped because twitter.com was already taken; the team bought that domain about six months after launch and renamed the service.
Q 03Which of these was NOT one of Twitter's four founders?
Kevin Systrom
Kevin Systrom co-founded Instagram, not Twitter; Twitter's four founders were Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, Evan Williams and Noah Glass, who came up with the name.
Q 04What did the very first tweet, posted by Jack Dorsey in March 2006, say?
just setting up my twttr
Jack Dorsey's first tweet read 'just setting up my twttr'; he later sold it as an NFT for about $2.9 million in March 2021.
Q 05Twitter grew out of a side project at which startup?
Odeo, a podcasting service
Twitter began as a side project at Odeo, a podcasting service; its founders formed Obvious Corporation, bought Odeo back from its investors and spun Twitter out in April 2007.
Q 06What was Twitter's original character limit for a tweet?
140
The original limit was 140 characters, leaving room for a username inside a 160-character SMS message; the cap was later doubled and eventually lifted for paying subscribers.
Q 07In which year did Twitter double its character limit to 280?
2017
Twitter doubled the limit to 280 characters in November 2017; its tests showed English-language users hit the old cap far more often than Japanese-language users.
Q 08Which 2007 conference was Twitter's tipping point, tripling daily tweets from 20,000 to 60,000?
South by Southwest
At South by Southwest 2007 Twitter streamed tweets on hallway screens and attendees used it to pick panels and parties; daily tweets jumped from 20,000 to 60,000.
Q 09Who introduced the hashtag to Twitter in 2007?
Chris Messina
Chris Messina proposed the hashtag in an August 2007 tweet, borrowing the idea from IRC chat channels; Twitter's founders initially dismissed it as too nerdy.
Q 10What was the error image shown during Twitter's early outages, with birds hoisting a sea creature in a net?
The fail whale
The fail whale, drawn by Yiying Lu as 'Lifting a Dreamer', showed a flock of birds hoisting a whale in a net on Twitter's over-capacity error page.
Q 11Roughly what was Twitter's uptime in 2007?
98%, about six days down
Twitter's 2007 uptime was roughly 98%, about six days down over the year; outages were most embarrassing during live tech events such as the January 2008 Macworld keynote.
Q 12The original 2006 Twitter bird turned out to be what?
Clip art by a British designer
The original bird was 'Clip art by a British designer': Simon Oxley's iStockphoto image, which Twitter replaced with an original design by Biz Stone and Philip Pascuzzo.
Q 13Whose account was the first on Twitter to reach one million followers, in 2009?
Ashton Kutcher
Q 21Who claimed responsibility for hijacking the AP's account in April 2013 and briefly moving the stock market?
The Syrian Electronic Army
The Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-Assad hacking group, posted a fake tweet about explosions at the White House from the AP's account, briefly wiping billions off US stock indices.
Q 22Fans of which Studio Ghibli film set the record for most tweets in one second in August 2013?
Castle in the Sky
Viewers of Castle in the Sky tweeted 'balse', the film's destruction spell, as it was spoken on Japanese TV on 2 August 2013: 143,199 tweets in one second.
Q 23Which host's Oscars 'selfie' of twelve celebrities became the most retweeted image ever in March 2014?
Ashton Kutcher reached one million followers in April 2009, narrowly beating CNN's breaking-news account in a much-publicised race he had challenged the network to.
Q 14Which baseball manager's lawsuit over an impersonator helped prompt the 2009 launch of Verified Accounts?
Tony La Russa
Tony La Russa, then managing the St. Louis Cardinals, sued Twitter in May 2009 over a fake account posting in his name; Verified Accounts launched weeks later.
Q 15In January 2010, who posted the first unassisted tweet from off Earth?
A NASA astronaut on the ISS
A NASA astronaut on the ISS, T. J. Creamer, sent the first unassisted tweet from space on 22 January 2010 once the station gained live internet access.
Q 16A parody account boomed in March 2011 while its subject was loose for a week. What was it?
A cobra that escaped the Bronx Zoo
@BronxZoosCobra kicked off a wave of interest in parody accounts.
Q 17What handle did Pope Benedict XVI use when he joined Twitter in December 2012?
@pontifex
Benedict XVI's handle was @pontifex, Latin for 'bridge-builder', a papal title; his first tweets answered questions tagged #askpontifex, and the account passed to Francis after Benedict's 2013 resignation.
Q 18Which five-digit US short code did Twitter use for sending tweets by text message?
40404
Twitter used the US short code 40404 for tweeting by SMS; the developers first considered 10958 before choosing 40404 for ease of memorability.
Q 19How much did Twitter's 2013 initial public offering raise?
US$1.8 billion
The November 2013 IPO raised US$1.8 billion, selling 70 million shares at $26 each on the New York Stock Exchange, chosen over Nasdaq after Facebook's glitch-hit listing the year before.
Q 20What was Vine, launched by Twitter in 2013?
A short-video service
Vine was 'A short-video service' whose six-second looping clips made stars of a generation of creators before Twitter closed it after four years.
Ellen DeGeneres
Ellen DeGeneres's selfie, snapped by Bradley Cooper, topped three million retweets and held the record until a teenager's plea for free chicken nuggets beat it three years later.
Q 24Which Japanese billionaire's giveaway tweet set a new retweet record of 4.4 million in January 2019?
Yusaku Maezawa
Yusaku Maezawa, founder of the fashion retailer Zozo, offered ¥100 million to followers who retweeted his post; he was also announced as the passenger for a private SpaceX flight around the Moon.
Q 25What was Twitter's 'fleets' feature, launched in November 2020 and killed in August 2021?
Posts that vanished after 24 hours
Fleets were 'Posts that vanished after 24 hours', Twitter's answer to Stories; meant to coax shy users into posting, they were mostly used by already-active accounts and were dropped.
Q 26What is Twitter Spaces?
A live-audio conversation feature
Spaces is 'A live-audio conversation feature' introduced in late 2020 as Twitter's answer to Clubhouse, letting a host invite speakers into a room while everyone else listens.
Q 27What did the hijacked tweets ask followers to do in the July 2020 hack of Obama's and Gates's accounts?
Send bitcoin to double their money
The tweets urged followers to 'Send bitcoin to double their money' — a classic doubling scam; Twitter temporarily blocked all verified accounts from tweeting while it regained control.
Q 28What was the original name of the fact-checking programme renamed Community Notes in 2022?
Birdwatch
Birdwatch piloted in January 2021 with about 1,000 US contributors, weeks after the Capitol attack, and was renamed Community Notes in November 2022 at Musk's request.
Q 29Which decentralised social project did Twitter fund before it spun off as a rival?
Bluesky
Bluesky was announced by Jack Dorsey in December 2019 as a Twitter-funded effort to build an open protocol; it became an independent company in 2021 and launched its own app.
Q 30What was the paid subscription that became X Premium called when it launched in June 2021?
Twitter Blue
Twitter Blue debuted in Canada and Australia in June 2021, offering an undo-tweet timer and a reader mode; it was renamed X Premium after the company's rebrand.