Twitter descended into chaos on Wednesday after several of the platform’s primary functions stopped working without explanation.
The issues, which came shortly after the site attempted to introduce a new 4,000-character limit for Twitter Blue subscribers, resulted in international outages as well as errors with tweeting and sending DMs.
Countless users reported receiving notifications that they had reached their daily tweeting limit despite coming nowhere near Twitter’s 2,400-tweet-per-day maximum. Users eventually discovered a workaround by scheduling their tweets to go out one minute in the future.
The ability to retweet, follow, reply, and DM also became unavailable for many users. Tweetdeck, a popular tool that allows users to view numerous columns of their feed, also went down.
Twitter later acknowledged the issue in a statement on the platform, noting that it was attempting to remedy the problem.
“Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you,” the company’s support account wrote. “Sorry for the trouble. We’re aware and working to get this fixed.”
The platform has not responded to press inquiries regarding the matter as Twitter no longer appears to have a communications department.
Fortune Magazine journalist Kylie Robison later reported that Musk had sent out a company-wide email urging his staff to focus on fixing the errors.
“Please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up,” Musk reportedly wrote.
Twitter thus far has not explained what caused the issue, although it was largely fixed late Wednesday afternoon. Musk, a prolific tweeter, does not appear to have directly addressed the issues either.
It remains unclear if the problems were due to simple bugs, the introduction of the new character limit on Twitter Blue, or related to Twitter’s plans to limit access to its API.
Twitter continues to face dozens of issues in the wake of Musk’s purchase, which saw much of the company’s workforce fired.
