Twitter struggles to fix crisis as many can’t tweet

SAN FRANCISCO — Many Twitter users were unable to post tweets, follow accounts or access their direct messages on Wednesday as the Elon Musk-owned platform ran into a slew of widespread technical problems.

“For some of you, Twitter may not work as expected. Sorry to bother you. We are aware of this and are working to fix it.” The company tweeted from its “support” account.

More information was unavailable Wednesday afternoon, and an email asking for comment from the company’s press office 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, this comes to 2,400 per day – or 100 per hour – far more than most regular human-run accounts sent on the platform.

Accounts also had issues when they tried to follow another Twitter user, receiving a “You can’t follow other people at this time” message with a link to the business page. limit compliance policy.

Twitter’s longstanding limit on the number of accounts a single user can follow in one day is 400 – again, more than a typical Twitter user can typically reach on any given day.

It’s unclear what caused Wednesday’s crash, but Twitter engineers and experts warn that the platform is at increased risk of wear and tear as Musk fired most of the people who worked on its work.

As early as November, the engineers who left Twitter told the Associated Press why they expected significant trouble for the more than 230 million Twitter users now that more than two-thirds of Twitter’s core service engineers before Musk appeared to be gone.

While they don’t expect a crash in the near future, the engineers said Twitter could get very rough on the edges, especially if Musk makes major changes without much off-platform testing.

One Twitter engineer who worked in core services told the AP in November that clusters of engineering teams had dwindled from about 15 pre-Musk people (not counting team leaders, who were all fired) to three or four to even more resignations.

Then more institutional knowledge that cannot be replaced overnight went out the door.

“Everything can break,” said the programmer.