X Is Getting Rid of Twitter, and It May Affect Your Account
The site formerly known as Twitter has been called “X” for over two years . Yet many of us still call it by its old, iconic name. In fact, whenever I need to visit something, I go to twitter.com rather than x.com, even though the site always redirects to the latter . Is it muscle memory? A slight rebellion? Probably both. But the days of typing “t” into Safari’s address bar and clicking the autocompleted twitter.com URL appear to be coming to an end, as X appears to be finally shedding its Twitter domain name.
The news began with a post on Friday from an X account titled “Security.” The post stated that all accounts using a security key for two-factor authentication (2FA) must re-register their key by November 10th to continue using X. The post stated that you can re-register an existing key or a new one, and that if you do the latter, other security keys on your account will stop working unless you re-register them. If you take no action, your account will be locked after the 10th.
This change fueled speculation that someone had compromised X’s authentication infrastructure, prompting the X account to publish another post in the “Security” section explaining the security change. Not only was the issue unrelated to security, but it only affected Yubikeys and passwords, not authenticator apps or other two-factor authentication protocols. However, the key was hidden in this post: “Keys are currently tied to the twitter.com domain: X plans to deprecate this domain, requiring users to re-register on x.com.”
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If X really does decide to take down the domain, it will truly be the end of an era. The platform itself won’t change anything: X will still be a place to publish your thoughts and escape the worst of humanity. But once twitter.com goes down, it will truly be X to the core. Perhaps that will be enough for me to finally let it go.
Of course, the main issue here concerns users with security keys linked to Twitter, not X. These users will be unable to access their accounts after November 10th unless they take a few simple steps to comply with the changes.
Don’t stay locked in X
If you want to ensure that you can continue using X after the twitter.com domain is retired, you need to make sure your 2FA setup is compliant.
The X account security section states that if you have a Yubikey or access key affected by this issue, you will be prompted to automatically re-register with the x.com domain. However, you can also do this manually by going to your X account’s two-factor authentication (2FA) settings and following the on-screen instructions. If you don’t want to re-register the key, you can choose a different two-factor authentication (2FA) method or disable it entirely, although I strongly recommend against the latter option for the sake of your account security.