Twitter outage: what happened, when will service be restored, and more

Why is there suddenly a Tweet limit?

Although Twitter seems to be coming back to life, we have to wonder why there are suddenly warnings about a tweet limit. There have been countless questionable ways Elon Musk has tried to monetize the platform. It seems that setting a Tweet limit would only serve this purpose.

Musk has shown support in the past for even longer tweets, up to thousands of characters or words long. Taking a restrictive stance now is not inappropriate, because the character of the CEO is capricious. It just leaves us guessing.

Backup, but not for everyone

Some users are now successfully sending tweets, but the site is still being reported as ‘down’ on Is It Down and not all features seem to be working. However, it seems that the outage was short-lived, but the real news is yet to come.

The story so far…

Twitter is still down! A little, depending on how you access it. According to the website Is it down now, Twitter is offline as of the start of this live blog. We love covering Twitter dramas and we’ll keep you up to date with news of what’s happening with Twitter, whether it’s part of a planned change or something has gone horribly wrong.

At this point, you can still access Twitter.com from a desktop browser like Chrome. Some mobile users report total failure when trying to access the site. Even if you have access to Twitter, the problems are just beginning.

You can’t send a direct Tweet at this time without receiving a warning message. You can schedule a tweet for the future, even if it’s just for a minute. You can’t retweet, but you can like tweets.

The problem started when users were hit with a brand new warning that read “You have exceeded the daily limit for sending tweets.” My guess is that Elon Musk is about to introduce a Tweet limit, and we’ll have the privilege of paying if we want to tweet more. My guess is that the feature was rolled out early, or incompletely, or with bugs, or all of the above.

We’ll see if anything changes on Twitter.com and the mobile apps, and keep you posted if Twitter or its aspiring CEO has anything to say.

The #TwitterDown hashtag saw a similar spike on Twitter itself, which at least indicates that some people could tweet through it.

As of 5 p.m. EST, Downdetector reported a whopping 9,449 reports of Twitter errors. Many users were getting error messages that they had reached their daily tweet limit, something we can confirm.

The problem seems to extend to both the Twitter mobile app and desktop users, and it also affects retweets and DMs.

Twitter is currently offline around the world and we are busy investigating the cause of the widespread outage that is affecting at least the US and UK.