As of right now, Twitter is essentially dead to me. And surely to some of the over 700 followers of blogTO on Twitter. And to people all across Canada.

Twitter made a shocking announcement earlier today that service providers in Canada are charging too much to make outgoing Tweets via SMS possible. As a result, the Twitter experience is no longer the full Twitter experience - effective immediately.

Unexpected changes in our billing have forced us into a difficult situation with our Canadian SMS service. We can't afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our providers (where costs have been doubling for the past several months.) As a result, effective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode (21212).

The ability to update Twitter over SMS will still be supported over 21212. But we know that this is only part of the experience and we want to make Twitter work in the way folks want ... regardless of where they live.

There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world.) We're working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress.

(source)

How long will it be until we can get the full functionality of Twitter back remains an unknown.