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Twitter CEO Elon Musk. Adrien Fillon

Twitter outage results in many users being unable to tweet or follow accounts

Users first noticed the problem when they tried to send tweets and received a message saying they had reached their ‘tweet limit’.

MANY TWITTER USERS found themselves unable to tweet, follow accounts or access their direct messages as Elon Musk’s platform experienced a slew of widespread technical problems.

“Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Sorry for the trouble. We’re aware and working to get this fixed,” the company tweeted from its support account.

“You say some, but it was literally everyone,” read one of the replies under the company tweet.

Further details were unavailable last night and an email seeking comment from the company’s press account went unanswered. Twitter has dissolved its media relations team.

Users first noticed the problem when they tried to send tweets and received a message saying they had reached their “tweet limit”.

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.

This is the message Virgin Media News journalist Rob O’Hanrahan was faced with, despite only tweeting six times:

Users also had trouble when they tried to follow another Twitter user, getting a message: “You are unable to follow more people at this time,” with a link to the company’s policy on follow limits.

Twitter’s long-standing limit on how many accounts a single user can follow in a single day is 400 — again, more than a regular Twitter user would generally reach on any given day.

It is not clear what caused yesterday’s meltdown, but Twitter engineers and experts have been warning the platform is at an increased risk of fraying since Musk fired most of the people who worked on keeping it running.

In November, engineers who left Twitter said why they expect considerable unpleasantness for Twitter’s more than 230 million users now that well over two-thirds of the San Francisco-based company’s pre-Musk core services engineers are apparently gone.

While they do not anticipate near-term collapse, the engineers said Twitter could get very rough at the edges — especially if Musk makes major changes without much off-platform testing.

One Twitter engineer, who had worked in core services, said engineering team clusters were down from about 15 people pre-Musk — not including team leaders, who were all made redundant — to three or four before even more resignations.

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

“Everything could break,” the programmer said.

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12 Comments
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    Install the app to use these features.
    Mute Rob LLoyd
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    Feb 9th 2023, 9:17 AM

    Oh no. The end of the world

    107
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    Mute Brendan Gordon
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    Feb 9th 2023, 10:08 AM

    Looks like the bots in this comment section are malfunctioning as well…

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    Mute Keth Warsaw
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    Feb 9th 2023, 9:23 AM

    Oh no, End of the word!

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    Mute Ciarán O' Donoghue
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    Feb 9th 2023, 9:33 AM

    Oh no! The end of the world!

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    Mute Willie Murphy
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    Feb 9th 2023, 9:50 AM

    1st world problems right there!!!

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    Mute Seán Ó Briain
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    Feb 9th 2023, 10:23 AM

    This is what happens when you fire half of your staff.

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    Mute Chris Linehan
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    Feb 9th 2023, 9:38 AM

    End of the world. Oh no!

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    Mute Ciaran Forde
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    Feb 9th 2023, 9:53 AM

    World end, oh no!

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    Mute Genera L Consensus
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    Feb 9th 2023, 9:40 AM

    What will the trump bot Q anons do??

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    Mute Mark Hannan
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    Feb 9th 2023, 10:22 AM

    https://truthsocial.com/ Phew, we are saved..

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    Mute Bennett blaster
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    Feb 9th 2023, 12:53 PM

    St Elon of musk, what a balloon

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    Mute Richard Ahern
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    Feb 9th 2023, 6:44 PM

    That is a good thing.

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