Toscad News Some Twitter users were unable to tweet on Wednesday after the website experienced technical problems.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Twitter began experiencing international outages, with many users unable to perform basic functions like tweeting, sending direct messages, and following accounts. When users wanted to tweet, an error message was generated saying that a daily limit of tweets had been reached, even from accounts that had not tweeted that day.
According to Twitter, users typically have to tweet 2,400 times to reach the platform’s daily limit.
The outage-tracking website DownDetector reported the glitch at just before 22:00 GMT
Some clever users discovered that they could still tweet by scheduling their posts, while some brands still appeared to be able to tweet. Other users immediately began reporting issues, according to the Internet tracking service Downdetector, which documented thousands of problems with the platform. One user reporting problems joked that the glitches were tied to Twitter’s mass layoffs, including many engineers, while others tweeted speculation that the features were possibly disabled because Twitter began updating its API ahead of the platform’s plan to cut off free access, starting Thursday
Musk later tweeted to confirm that Twitter was looking into reported Twitter restrictions in Turkey, but so far, Musk has not tweeted about the global outage. Like many Twitter users, it’s possible that Musk simply does not have access to tweet an update right now.
Elon Musk has slashed Twitter’s workforce over the last few months since he acquired the platform last October for $44bn (£36.5bn).
Last month the Tesla and SpaceX boss said Twitter had about 2,300 employees – down from around 8,000 when he took over.
For months experts have been warning that such deep cuts could cause technical issues, though it is not yet clear if the reduced headcount was to blame for Wednesday’s outage.
It appears part of the outage was soon fixed, with many users reporting they could tweet.
Some reported being notified by Twitter that they were over the 2,400-tweet-per-day limit, even if they had not posted on Wednesday.
Account holders had also reported problems with Twitter messages. Several users said they could not access TweetDeck – a dashboard that can be used with Twitter.
It’s not yet clear how many people were affected.
“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 said.
In recent weeks many users have complained of bugs while using Twitter – including some claiming they could increase the reach of tweets if they locked their accounts.
Tech news website The Information reported that Mr Musk had told Twitter employees to pause on new feature development “in favour of maximising system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up”.
Twitter also announced that users of its $8 a month subscription service in the US can now post longer tweets.
Twitter Blue subscribers can now post up to 4,000 characters, far more than the 280-character limit imposed on non-paying users.
“But don’t worry, Twitter is still Twitter,” the company said in a lengthy tweet announcing the feature.
BBC
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