Twitter users across the U.S. And Canada on Wednesday were unable to send messages and received an error message informing them that they were “over the daily limit for sending tweets.” Roughly 30 minutes later, users were able to send tweets again but are still unable to send direct messages and follow other users.
“Please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up,” Musk wrote in an email to staff around the time of the outage and viewed by Coins2Day. In a follow-up email, Musk wrote, Twitter “should also pause on transitioning away from Sacramento, consolidating Atlanta,” which are data centers Twitter uses, “and reducing [Google Cloud Platform] usage until at least next week.”
The messages appear to be part of a widespread outage at the social media platform amid deep cost-cutting and tumultuous management under Musk, who acquired the company in November.
While multiple users reported the error message when they tried to tweet on Wednesday, some users noted that they were still able to send scheduled tweets.
A Twitter employee told Coins2Day that the engineering Slack channels were “going crazy” and the teams were floating various ideas around as to why this error occurred, from changes to the free API feature, which allows outside developers to access Twitter data, to a data center outage.
Twitter acknowledged the outage but did not provide a reason for what went wrong.
This is a developing story, check back for updates.
Update, Feb. 8, 2023, 7:20 p.m: The headline for this article was changed to reflect new information.