Twitter faced one of its first widespread outages of Elon Musk’s tenure on Wednesday, leaving the site unusable for many and prompting an internal scramble to restore the site’s features. The maximum outages were reported from users in the US.
The outage persisted for hours and led Twitter to apologize to users for the trouble. Some users trying to post new tweets received a pop-up saying, “you are over the daily limit for sending tweets.” Other Twitter users received a pop-up which read, “We’re sorry, we weren’t able to send your Tweet.”
Twitter’s support account on Thursday announced that users may be facing trouble with the platform without explaining the source of the glitch. It is not clear what caused Wednesday’s meltdown, but Twitter engineers and experts have been warning that the platform is at an increased risk of fraying since Musk fired most of the people who worked on keeping it running.
Outage tracking website Downdetector also showed a spike in user glitch reports for the two Meta platforms – Twitter and Facebook.More than 12,000 Facebook users reported errors and about 7,000 incidents were reported for Instagram.
Users also reported issues with Facebook’s online messaging service Messenger.
While Twitter has for years limited the number of tweets an account can send, it is 2,400 per day — or 100 an hour — far more than most regular, human-run accounts send on the platform.