Twitter broke after deploying 4,000-character Tweets

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Illustration of Twitter bird crying

Twitter broke for several hours after deploying a new 4,000 character limit earlier in the day.

On Wednesday afternoon, users found they were unable to publish tweets. Instead they received a message saying “You are over the daily limit for sending Tweets,” or simply an error message. Users discovered they were still able to publish tweets by scheduling them via the web app, which somehow bypassed the outage.

screenshot of tweet unable to publish because the user has allegedly reached the daily tweet limit.

Mashable’s Tim Marcin is one of the many users who were informed they’d exceeded their daily tweet limit.
Credit: Twitter

Some users were also unable to see their messages, and others noticed that only verified accounts showed up in their feed. Starting around 4 p.m. ET, Mashable’s sibling site Down Detector received thousands of outage reports.

Messages on Twitter showing an error

Twitter messages aren’t loading for some users.
Credit: Twitter

Earlier today, Twitter announced a new feature for Twitter Blue subscribers that lets them tweet up to 4,000 characters, which is likely related to the outage. A leaked email from Twitter CEO Elon Musk to Twitter staff says “Please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up.”

Facebook, Instagram, and… the McDonald’s app are all reporting outages per Down Detector, so it’s possibly server-related.

The glitch appears to have been resolved. We will update this story if Twitter officially explains what happened… but we’re not holding our breath.

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