Twitter Facing Outage And Apparent Glitches—And It’s Unclear Why

Topline

Twitter appeared to be plagued by a widespread outage Wednesday afternoon, after many users received a message saying they had gone over “the daily limit for sending tweets” when they attempted to post, in what appears to be the most significant glitch Elon Musk has faced since taking over the company.

Key Facts

The daily tweet limit is 2,400 per day, which is “further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals,” Twitter notes on its website.

The problem appeared to peak around 5 p.m. Eastern time, when online outage tracker DownDetector reported more than 9,000 outages, though more than 5,000 were still being reported shortly after 6 p.m.

The cause of the outage remains unclear, and Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Forbes.

Musk sent an email to Twitter staffers after the outage began telling them to “pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up,” according to Fortune.

Crucial Quote

“Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Sorry for the trouble. We’re aware and working to get this fixed,” Twitter Support tweeted shortly before 6:30 p.m.

Surprising Fact

The outage began shortly after Twitter announced it was expanding the character limit for tweets from Twitter Blue subscribers in the U.S. from 280 to 4,000.

Key Background

Wednesday’s issues appear to be the biggest real-time technical problems Musk’s greatly scaled-down Twitter staff has had to deal with. Twitter prior to Musk’s takeover had about 7,500 employees, but he swiftly laid off most of the staff while hundreds of others resigned as he retooled Twitter’s work lifestyle to be what he called “extremely hardcore.” Twitter is now down to about 1,300 workers—fewer than 550 being engineers, according to internal documents obtained by CNBC.

Tangent

The House Oversight Committee held a hearing Wednesday over allegations Twitter’s previous leadership made policy decisions favorable to Democrats. The meeting was suspended for about an hour in the early afternoon due to a power outage.

Further Reading

Marjorie Taylor Greene Assails Ex-Twitter Execs For Banning Her Account—Accuses One Of Endorsing Child Sexualization (Forbes)

Twitter Boosts Character Limit To 4,000 For Twitter Blue Subscribers (Forbes)