On Wednesday, several Twitter users reported encountering technical difficulties while using the platform owned by Elon Musk.
The issue prevented users from tweeting, following accounts, and accessing their direct messages.
The Twitter Support account acknowledged the issue and stated they were working to resolve it. No further information was provided as Twitter has discontinued its media relations team.
“Some of you may find that Twitter is not functioning as you would expect it to. Thanks for your patience.”
The problems first arose when users tried to send tweets and received a message indicating they had reached their daily tweet limit.
Twitter imposes a cap on the number of tweets a user can send per day, which is set at 2,400 or 100 per hour.
This limit is significantly higher than the average number of tweets sent by regular human-run accounts.
Additionally, users encountered difficulties when trying to follow other Twitter users, receiving a message that they were unable to follow more people at that time due to the company’s follow-limit policy.
The follow limit on Twitter is set at 400 per day, which is also higher than the typical number of accounts a regular user would follow in a day.
The exact cause of Wednesday’s meltdown remains unknown, but experts have warned that the platform’s stability has been at increased risk since most of the team responsible for maintaining its operations was fired by Elon Musk.
In November, former engineers at Twitter alerted the Associated Press of their concerns regarding the future of the platform with the majority of the pre-Musk core services engineers no longer being a part of the company.
They foresaw significant challenges for the platform, which has over 230 million users, but they did not expect a sudden collapse.
However, the engineers warned that if Musk implements major changes without thorough testing outside of the platform, Twitter could experience significant difficulties.
A former Twitter core services engineer stated that the engineering team size had drastically decreased from around 15 people pre-Musk to just three to four, leading to a loss of institutional knowledge that cannot be swiftly replaced.
The programmer expressed the potential for everything to “break” as a result of these changes and the loss of crucial personnel within the engineering team.