SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Twitter experienced widespread issues Wednesday, with users attempting to post instead receiving error messages, the most serious disruption to the service since Elon Musk purchased it in October.
It was unclear what caused the outage or whether the issues were widespread, but for about an hour, many users received an error message stating that they were “over the daily limit for sending Tweets.”
Some users reported that they could post if they scheduled their tweet to be published later rather than immediately.
Later Wednesday, Twitter’s main posting service appeared to be back online, but other features, including direct messages, appeared to be down.
More than an hour after the outages began, the company announced on one of its verified accounts that it was aware of the issues and was working to resolve them.
When attempting to retweet someone else’s post, some users received the following error message: “Sorry! You’ve reached your Tweet limit. Try it again tomorrow.”
According to Twitter’s website, there is a daily limit of 2,400 posts per day, but this is a limit that few users ever reach.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for more information about the outage.
Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter and subsequent decision to lay off the majority of the company’s employees prompted early predictions that the site’s infrastructure would fail, but those predictions had largely not come true before Wednesday.
Downdetector, a website that tracks social media complaints about online service outages, reported a sharp increase in Twitter complaints beginning around 5 p.m. Eastern time.
On early Wednesday evening, NBC News was unable to send tweets from any of its accounts and received a warning about the tweet limit. A scheduled tweet sent via Tweetdeck, a popular Twitter client, was successful.
