The site appears to be fully functional after Wednesday's weirdness, but the cause remains unclear.
Twitter appears to be working normally again after widespread issues were reported on Wednesday.
Problems started around 1:30 p.m. PT, according to outage monitoring site Down Detector. Later in the day, Twitter CEO Elon Musk acknowledged "multiple internal & external issues simultaneously," but the company didn't identify what caused the problems or respond to a request for comment.
Multiple internal & external issues simultaneously today. Should be fully back on track later tonight.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2023
People using the social network on Wednesday reported losing access to direct messages, getting error messages saying they were "over the daily limited for sending tweets" and needing to schedule tweets in order to post them.
FYI: It's not just you. Twitter's broken right now.
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) February 8, 2023
Sending Tweets is down. DMs are down. You can still schedule tweets a minute in advance.
Twitter is rate limiting lots of people after a few tweets which is funny given who owns it pic.twitter.com/MnzawHwIoT
— Alex Kantrowitz (@Kantrowitz) February 8, 2023
About two hours after complaints of widespread issues surfaced, the Twitter Support account acknowledged that the service "may not be working as expected" and said it was working to resolve the problem.
Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Sorry for the trouble. We're aware and working to get this fixed.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) February 8, 2023
Hours before the issues started, Twitter rolled out its longer tweet option, allowing Twitter Blue subscribers to create posts with up to 4,000 characters as opposed to the previous cap of 280. This is one of the multitude of changes to the social media platform since its acquisition by Musk in October.
Musk emailed employees Wednesday afternoon, according to a Fortune reporter's tweet, urging them to "please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up."
SCOOP: Elon has emailed staff following the Twitter outage.
— Kylie Robison (@kyliebytes) February 8, 2023
“Please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up.”