Twitter broke for several hours after deploying a new 4,000 character limit earlier in the day.
On Wednesday afternoon, users found they were unable to publish tweets. Instead they received a message saying “You are over the daily limit for sending Tweets,” or simply an error message. Users discovered they were still able to publish tweets by scheduling them via the web app, which somehow bypassed the outage.
Here’s why Twitter users are all posting Twitter Spaces links in their tweets
Credit: Twitter
Some users were also unable to see their messages, and others noticed that only verified accounts showed up in their feed. Starting around 4 p.m. ET, Mashable’s sibling site Down Detector received thousands of outage reports.
Credit: Twitter
Earlier today, Twitter announced a new feature for Twitter Blue subscribers that lets them tweet up to 4,000 characters, which is likely related to the outage. A leaked email from Twitter CEO Elon Musk to Twitter staff says “Please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up.”
Tweet may have been deleted
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Facebook, Instagram, and… the McDonald’s app are all reporting outages per Down Detector, so it’s possibly server-related.
The glitch appears to have been resolved. We will update this story if Twitter officially explains what happened… but we’re not holding our breath.