Many Twitter users found themselves unable to tweet, follow accounts or access their direct messages on Wednesday as the Elon Musk-owned platform experienced a host of widespread technical issues.
“Twitter may not work as expected for some of you. Sorry for the inconvenience. We are aware and working to resolve this issue,” the company tweeted from its “support” account.
More details were not available on Wednesday and an email seeking comment from the company’s press account went unanswered. Twitter has disbanded its media relations team.
Users first noticed the problem when they tried to send tweets and received a message that they had reached their “tweet limit”.
While Twitter has for years limited the number of tweets an account can send, it’s 2,400 per day – or 100 per hour – far more than most human-run accounts on the platform.
Users also ran into trouble when they tried to follow another Twitter user, receiving a “You can’t follow more people at this time” message with a link to the company’s account. tracking limits policy.
Twitter’s long-standing limit on the number of accounts a single user can follow in a single day is 400 – again, more than a regular Twitter user would typically reach on any given day.
It’s unclear what caused Wednesday’s collapse, but Twitter engineers and experts have warned the platform is at increased risk of unraveling since Musk fired most of the people who worked on its operation. .
Already in November, the engineers who left Twitter described for the Associated Press why they expect considerable inconvenience for Twitter’s more than 230 million users now that more than two-thirds of the San Francisco-based company’s core services engineers have apparently disappeared.
While they don’t anticipate a near-term meltdown, engineers said Twitter could get very rough around the edges, especially if Musk makes major changes without too much off-platform testing.
A Twitter engineer, who had worked in core services, told the AP in November that engineering team groups had grown from about 15 people before Musk — not including team leaders, who were all fired – three or four before even more resignations.
Then more institutional knowledge that cannot be replaced overnight is gone.
“Everything could break,” said the programmer.