Twitter down: Users being told they are over daily tweet limit

Twitter had shed greater than two-thirds of its employees since Elon Musk took over the corporate final yr, and the steep cuts have led many to surprise how lengthy the positioning might proceed functioning usually — and what would possibly occur if technical issues arose.

On Wednesday, that concern grew to become the truth as Twitter mentioned it was working internally to get the issues fastened. “Sorry for the trouble. We’re aware and working to get this fixed,” it tweeted.

Attempts to ship tweets have been met with messages studying: “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.” Beyond posting tweets, customers reported an incapability to ship direct messages, observe different accounts, and cargo content material on their timelines.

The web site Down Detector, which tracks outages based mostly on consumer reviews, mentioned: “User reports indicate problems at Twitter.”

While some tweets continued to load, many have been from customers who found a workaround to ship their posts: scheduling tweets prematurely.

Some of the features seemed to be coming again late Wednesday afternoon, because the outage had stretched over an hour. But the issues endured for a lot of — as customers refreshed the positioning to search out their notifications weren’t loading and older tweets have been populating their timelines. By late night, lots of the features appeared to have been restored.

On Down Detector, the variety of reviews — which had peaked within the afternoon — was down however nonetheless nicely above regular ranges.

Musk’s layoffs, and the fallout from an inner ultimatum urging employees to decide to an “extremely hardcore” Twitter or depart their jobs, led to feverish hypothesis concerning the downfall of Twitter. As a whole bunch departed the corporate after refusing to decide to Musk’s pledge, many departments — together with those who deal with core features — have been short-staffed, down to 2, one or zero remaining employees.

Musk bought the positioning for $44 billion in October, pledging to revive “free speech” and deal with points akin to spam and bots, as he heaped criticism on the prior administration’s method to content material moderation.

A congressional oversight committee held hearings on Wednesday regarding allegations that Twitter’s earlier employees made selections favorable to Democrats within the 2020 elections. At the listening to, energy briefly went out on Capitol Hill.

Even earlier than Musk’s takeover, workers had raised issues about Twitter’s resilience within the occasion of outages. Twitter’s off-site knowledge facilities have been highlighted as a significant vulnerability.

In a grievance obtained by congressional committees, whistleblower Peiter Zatko, for instance, raised the prospect of overlapping outages at Twitter’s knowledge facilities that might depart it unable to appropriately restart its servers. Such an outage, he mentioned, might result in a lack of important knowledge and depart the service down for months.