Many Twitter users were unable to tweet, follow accounts, or access direct messages on Wednesday due to a spate of significant technical issues that plagued the Elon Musk-owned platform. “Twitter may not function properly for some of you. Apologies for the trouble. “We are aware of the issue and are working to resolve it,” the company’s “help” account tweeted.
Further information was unavailable Wednesday afternoon, and the company’s press account did not respond to an email requesting comment. Twitter has eliminated its public relations department. When users attempted to send tweets, they saw a notification informing them that they had hit their “tweet limit.” Although Twitter has limited the number of tweets an account can send for years, the daily restriction of 2,400 tweets, or 100 tweets per hour, is significantly higher than the average number of tweets sent by human-operated accounts.
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When accounts attempted to follow another Twitter user, they received the error notice “You are unable to follow more people at this time” with a link to Twitter’s policy on follow limitations. Twitter’s long-standing limit on the number of accounts a user can follow in a single day is 400, which is again more than a typical Twitter user would follow in a single day.
Uncertainty surrounds the reason of Wednesday’s meltdown, but Twitter engineers and analysts have warned that the network is at a greater danger of fraying since Musk sacked the majority of those responsible for maintaining it operational. Already in November, engineers who departed Twitter explained to The Associated Press why they anticipate significant discomfort for Twitter’s more than 230 million users now that the vast majority of Twitter’s pre-Musk core systems engineers are now gone. While they do not anticipate a collapse in the immediate future, Twitter might become extremely unstable if Musk makes significant changes without extensive off-platform testing.
One Twitter employee who had worked in core services told the Associated Press in November that engineering team clusters had shrunk from approximately 15 people pre-Musk — excluding team leaders, who had all been laid go — to three or four people prior to more resignations. Then, further institutional knowledge that cannot be recreated overnight departed. The coder stated, “Anything might break.”
