On Wednesday, many Twitter users experienced problems with basic functions such as tweeting, retweeting, quoting tweets, sending direct messages, and following others on the platform.
While the platform’s website and app continued to function, some users found that interaction with previously posted content was limited or even stopped working. Attempting to tweet or retweet, for example, displayed a message indicating that they had exceeded the daily limit for sending tweets.
Direct messages simply disappeared, and the tab only displayed the message “Something went wrong.” Within the company, a “scramble” ensued to find the cause of the problem and fix it. After an afternoon of uncertainty, many users regained the ability to tweet and “like,” but the ability to send direct messages and retweets was still not working.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk responded to the outage by sending an email to company staff, instructing them to “pause development of new features” in order to ensure “the stability and robustness of the system.”
These problems with functionality and bugs have become more frequent at Twitter, a predictable result of the massive layoffs and extreme cost-cutting implemented by Musk. And despite having fewer employees than a decade ago, Twitter has seen an increase in the number of users, growing from 200 million a month to 250 million a day over the same period.