SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter experienced widespread problems Wednesday when users trying to post instead received error messages, the service’s most serious outage since Elon Musk bought the platform in October.
It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the outage or if the issues were universal, but many users were getting an error saying they had “exceeded the daily limit for sending Tweets”.
Other users said they could post if they scheduled their tweet to be published later instead of immediately.
But some users said the problems were more widespread than trying to post because they couldn’t access or send direct messages.
And when they tried to retweet someone else’s post, some users got another error: “Sorry! You’ve exceeded your tweet limit. Please try to retweet again tomorrow.”
According to her, Twitter has a daily limit of 2,400 posts per day websitebut that’s a ceiling few users have ever reached.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for information about the outage.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter for $44 billion and his subsequent decision to do so to eliminate most of the company’s employees led predictions early on that the infrastructure of the site could failbut those predictions had largely failed to materialize before Wednesday.
Downdetector, a website that monitors social media complaints about online service disruptions, showed a sharp spike in Twitter complaints from about 5 p.m. Eastern time.
NBC News was unable to send tweets from one of its accounts early Wednesday night and received the tweet limit warning. A scheduled tweet sent through Tweetdeck, a popular Twitter client, did work.
This is an evolving story. Check back later for updates.