NEW DELHI: Twitter has locked the account of news agency ANI citing that the account holder is below 13 years of age.
The Twitter handle of the news agency initially showed the message ‘Your account @ANI has been locked’.
“In order to create a Twitter account, you must be at least 13 years old. Twitter has determined that you don’t meet these age requirements, so your account has been locked and will be removed from Twitter,” read the notice by Twitter.
Later, a message on ANI’s Twitter page simply read: “This account doesn’t exist”.

ANI editor Smita Prakash took to Twitter to inform users about the incident and appealed to the social media company to restore the new agency’s handle.
“So those who follow ANI, some bad news, Twitter has locked out India’s largest news agency which has 7.6 million followers and sent this mail – under 13 years of age! Our gold tick was taken away, substituted with blue tick and now locked out,” she tweeted.
“Attention Twitter, can you restore the ANI handle please. We are not under 13 years of age!” Prakash appealed in another tweet.
NDTV’s account also locked
A few hours later, NDTV’s Twitter account was also locked and showed a similar message saying the “account does not exist”.