Twitter down? Users cannot tweet or access direct messages

SAN FRANCISCO — Many Twitter users were unable to tweet, follow accounts or access their direct messages on Wednesday as the Elon Musk-owned platform experienced a series of widespread technical issues.

“Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Sorry for the trouble. We are aware and working to fix it.” The company tweeted from its support account.

Further details were not available Wednesday afternoon, and an email seeking comment to the company’s press account went unanswered. Twitter has disbanded its media relations team.

Users first noticed the problem when they tried to send tweets and were told they had reached their “tweet limit”.

While Twitter has for years limited the number of tweets an account can send, 2,400 tweets per day — or 100 per hour — is far more than most regular human-run accounts send on the platform.

Accounts also experienced issues when trying to follow another Twitter user, receiving a message saying “You can’t follow other people at this time” with a link to the company adherence restrictions policy.

Twitter’s long-standing limit on the number of accounts a single user can subscribe to in a single day is 400 — again, more than the average Twitter user can achieve in any given day.

It’s unclear what caused Wednesday’s meltdown, but Twitter engineers and experts warn the platform is at increased risk of wear and tear after Musk fired most of the people who worked to keep it running.

Already in November, engineers who left Twitter described for the Associated Press why are they expecting significant trouble for Twitter’s more than 230 million users now that more than two-thirds of Twitter’s core service engineers before Musk have apparently left.

While they don’t expect a crash anytime soon, engineers said Twitter could get very rough around the edges — especially if Musk makes major changes without much testing outside of the platform.

One Twitter engineer who worked in core services told the AP in November that clusters of engineering teams had shrunk from about 15 people before Musk — not counting team leaders who were fired — to three or four before even more layoffs.

Then came more institutional knowledge that cannot be replaced overnight.

“Everything can break,” said the programmer.