Some Twitter users unable to post as platform hit by glitch

Thousands of users faced glitches in posting, receiving messages that they had exceeded a daily limit of tweets.

The Twitter logo and Elon Musk's silhouette are seen in this illustration.
The Twitter logo and an Elon Musk silhouette are seen in this illustration taken on December 19, 2022 [File: Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters]

Thousands of Twitter users complained on Wednesday they were unable to post messages, following which they were told that they had exceeded a daily limit of tweets.

Twitter’s billionaire owner Elon Musk tweeted early on Thursday that there were multiple “internal and external issues with the app simultaneously”, adding that the service should be back on track later that night.

Twitter was down for about 9,000 users in the United States at 5pm Eastern Time, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. The number of outages declined to 2,500 by 6pm Eastern.

Users in Asia reported on Thursday that they were not able to follow new people.

People also reported that TweetDeck, the popular dashboard for managing and viewing Twitter accounts, had stopped working.

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

The disruptions came on the same day Twitter added a length perk to its Blue subscription service costing $8 monthly in the United States.

Twitter Blue subscribers can now post tweets of up to 4,000 characters, far beyond the 280-character limit imposed on non-paying users, the tech firm said.

“But don’t worry, Twitter is still Twitter,” the tech firm said in a lengthy tweet announcing the perk.

“We know longer Tweets could mean a lot of scrolling, so they’ll be capped at 280 characters on your timeline and you’ll see a ‘Show more’ prompt to click and read the whole Tweet.”

Musk slashed Twitter’s workforce late last year after he became the owner of the San Francisco-based company, raising concerns about having enough engineering talent on hand to keep the platform running smoothly.

US tech media reported on Wednesday that Musk told Twitter staff to put aside work on new features to focus on troubleshooting.

Source: News Agencies