Twitter broke for several hours after rolling out a new 4,000 character limit earlier today.
On Wednesday afternoon, users discovered they were unable to post tweets. Instead, they received a message saying “You’ve exceeded the daily Tweet sending limit”, or just an error message. Users found they were still able to post tweets by scheduling them through the web app, which somehow circumvented the glitch.
Mashable’s Tim Marcin is one of many users who have been notified that they have exceeded their daily tweet limit.
Some users were also unable to see their posts, and others noticed that only verified accounts were showing up in their feed. Starting around 4 p.m. ET, Mashable’s sister site Detector down(Opens in a new tab) received thousands of failure reports.
Twitter messages not loading for some users.
Earlier today, Twitter announcement(Opens in a new tab) a new feature for Twitter Blue followers that allows them to tweet up to 4,000 characters, which is likely related to the outage. A leaked email(Opens in a new tab) Twitter CEO Elon Musk to Twitter staff said: “Please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Upcoming Super Bowl.”
The tweet may have been deleted
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Facebook, Instagram, and…the McDonald’s app all report Down Detector outages, so it might be server-related.
The bug seems to have been fixed. We’ll update this story if Twitter officially explains what happened…but we’re not holding our breath.
