Twitter outage sees users told they are “over daily limit for sending tweets”

It is said that DownDetector, a real-time outage monitoring website, reported that glitch just before 10pm GMT.

Numerous people said they had been notified by Twitter that they had exceeded the 2,400-tweet-per-day limit, even if they had not shared any updates yesterday.

“Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you,” the site said. “Sorry for the trouble. We’re aware and working to get this fixed.”

It is reported that the issue was soon resolved, having affected approximately 9,000 users in the US.

Elon Musk has fired several top executives at Twitter and half of its staff since he bought the website last October for a staggering $44billon (£36.5bn). Last month, the CEO said the social media platform’s workforce had decreased from 8,000 employees to 2,300 following his acquisition.

Experts have been warning that such significant cuts could result in technical problems. However, it is not yet known whether the reduced headcount is what caused yesterday’s error.

Many users have complained about bugs on the site in recent weeks. According to The Information, Musk has instructed Twitter employees to pause on new feature development “in favour of maximising system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up”.

One of the changes introduced by the CEO is the option to share up to 4,000-character tweets as a Twitter Blue paid subscriber. Currently, non-paying users can post a maximum of 280 characters per tweet. The previous limit was 140, which was then doubled in 2017.

Meanwhile, Twitter is planning to launch an advert-free subscription tier. A new redesign has also changed up the default timeline feed that users see when they open the site, showing only suggested tweets.

Last month, a Twitter co-founder said they believed Musk “doesn’t seem like” the right person to own the social media platform.