For an hour and a half, many people were unable to post.
Twitter appears to be recovering from having technical issues that prevented people from tweeting, though problems with DMs, and accessing TweetDeck are still seemingly persisting. Downdetector reports that the problems started around 4:30PM ET, and the unfettered ability to tweet came back around an hour and a half later.
The company has said it’s aware of the existing issues, and is working on fixing them.
Tweets were visible during the partial outage, but several Verge staff members got a message saying that they were “over the daily limit for sending Tweets” when trying to post or retweet someone else’s post. Some Twitter users said were able to work around the error by scheduling tweets in the future.
There are still some issues with the service. I’m currently unable to reliably use DMs or notifications, follow new accounts, or use TweetDeck. Going to tweetdeck.twitter.com shows a log-in button (it shouldn’t, given that I’m already logged in on Twitter), and clicking on it just blanks out the screen before refreshing the page.
It’s currently unclear what caused the issues — reportedly even Twitter engineers aren’t sure what happened yet, according to The Information. The report says that it’s been suggested a change led to web requests being misdirected. Musk reportedly sent out an email to Twitter employees asking them to pause work on new features “in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up.”
This is happening as Twitter’s likely gearing up for a big change. Last week, the company announced that it’d mostly be turning off free access for its API starting tomorrow, and making changes to a core system could have unintended consequences. During the partial outage, however, the Twitter Dev account announced that the current free tier would get to live until February 13th. It also shared a few details on
Update Wednesday February 8th, 6:27PM ET: Updated to reflect that you can once again send tweets.
Update Wednesday February 8th, 7:27PM ET: Updated to add Twitter’s announcement about the free API tier and Musk’s request for Twitter employees to pause development.
