Twitter users around the world reported being unable to post or message each other on Wednesday, the latest in a series of disruptions to Elon Musk’s social media service.
The troubles began around 4:45 p.m. ET on Wednesday, when users attempting to post messages saw a notification stating that they had “exceeded the daily limit for sending tweets.” Others found they were unable to follow new accounts, and some were completely unsubscribed from their accounts. Direct messages and the search function for GIFs also stopped working.
Downdetector, a service that collects user reports of outages, also said Twitter was having trouble. At 7:00 p.m. Eastern time, some users began tweeting again as functionality was partially restored.
The cause of the disturbances was unclear. At least Twitter seemed able to tweet.
“Twitter may not work as expected for some of you,” the company said Posted. “Excuse the circumstances.”
The company and Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Twitter has changed significantly since Mr. Musk bought the company in October. The billionaire quit or fired more than half of Twitter employeesand is leaving the company with around 2,200 employees, up from 7,500 at the time of the acquisition. Mr. Musk also seems aggressive reduce other costs And suggested new ways for the company to generate revenue.
The changes have caused confusion and occasional failures in his service. There were outages for Twitter users end of December, after the company halted operations at one of its main data centers in Sacramento. This pause of several hours mostly affected people using the application on desktop computers, logging out or encountering error messages when trying to scroll their Twitter feeds.
Last month, users in Australia and New Zealand also reported Twitter outages that lasted more than half a day.
On Wednesday, users responded to the issues with disbelief and humor. Some questioned if their social media site of choice was really broken. Others speculated as to what might have caused the disruptions.
Some found ways to use the site despite the problems by using Twitter’s scheduling feature, which allowed them to post messages to the site. This led to numerous jokes as Twitter is known for its real-time nature and not intentional posts.
