I’m sorry to report a little bit of bad news for Canadian Twitter enthusiasts — they will no longer be able to receive outbound SMS updates from the service. This is largely due to the large cost involved, and, in fact, Twitter has stated in the past that it can cost over a thousand dollars per year per user to provide such services.

Here’s a quote from the company’s official blog,

“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).”

Is anyone surprised by this news? Not really. If you follow Twitter news, you’ll know that they recently removed the outbound SMS ability of their European users, also due to high costs. It’s reasonable to assume that US users are likely to lose their ability to receive outbound SMS updates from Twitter soon as well.