Twitter glitches pile up when key features fail

Twitter users around the world reported that they could no longer post messages or send messages to each other on Wednesday, the latest in a series of problems on the Elon Musk-owned social media service.

The problems began around 4:45 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, when users who tried to post saw a notification that they exceeded the daily tweeting limit. Others found they couldn’t follow new accounts, and some were completely disconnected from their accounts. Direct messages and the GIF search feature also stopped working.

Downdetector, a service that collects user reports of outages, also said Twitter was experiencing issues. At 7 p.m. EST, some users started tweeting again as functionality was partially restored.

The cause of the glitches was unclear. Twitter, at least, seemed to be able to tweet.

“Twitter may not work as expected for some of you,” the company said. job. “Sorry to bother you.”

The company and Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Twitter has undergone significant changes since Mr. Musk bought the company in October. The billionaire laid off or fired more than half of Twitter’s staff, leaving the company with around 2,200 employees, down from 7,500 at the time of the acquisition. Mr. Musk also aggressively cut other costs and came up with new ways for the company to generate revenue.

The changes have led to confusion and occasional outages in its service. Twitter users experienced outages in late December after the company shut down operations at one of its main data centers in Sacramento. The outage, which lasted several hours, primarily affected people using the app on desktop computers, causing them to be logged out or displaying error messages when they tried to scroll through their Twitter feeds.

Last month, users in Australia and New Zealand also reported Twitter outages that lasted more than half a day.

On Wednesday, users responded to the issues with disbelief and humor. Some have asked if their social media site of choice is really down. Others speculated on what could have caused the problems.

Some found ways to use the site despite the problems by using Twitter’s scheduling feature, which allowed them to post messages to the site. This led to a lot of jokes, since Twitter is known for its real-time nature and not its premeditated posts.