In an announcement released Wednesday last week, the Twitter team dropped outbound delivery of SMS messages to Canada. They’ve already dropped the axe on outbound SMS to Europe a while back, so this isn’t anything new. It’s still somewhat disappointing to see that flavor of SMS go away.

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).

It’s very important to note that inbound SMS will still work in Canada, so keep sending those texts to update your Twitter status. There’s also a possibility of finding a “scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world)”, so keep your chin up Canada. And Europe. In the meantime, check out tweetSMS - you’ll have to pay a little, but it’s better than nothing if you really need those messages.

From the official Twitter blog:

Beginning today, Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number.

Outbound SMS messages relate to the updates you set up to receive on your phone, from whichever users you select.

The way Twitter was initially set up to relay these messages was to send updates out to users from a UK number Twitter had established. The problem with this setup is that when a user sends an update into the Twitter UK number, Twitter then passes it out to whoever has signed up to receive your updates. The user posting the message is only charged for the one inbound message, but Twitter is footing the bill for all of the outbound messaging.

Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US.

Read the full story