World News | Twitter scrambles to fix crash as many unable to tweet

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 (AP) — Many Twitter users found they couldn’t tweet, follow accounts or access their direct messages on Wednesday as the platform owned by Elon Musk encountered a series of widespread technical problems.

“For some of you, Twitter may not be working as expected. Sorry for the inconvenience. We are aware of this issue and are working hard to resolve it,” the company tweeted via its “support” account.

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No further details were available Wednesday afternoon, and an email to the company’s news account seeking comment was not returned. Twitter disbanded its media relations team.

Users first noticed the problem when they tried to tweet and received a message saying they had reached their “tweet limit.”

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While Twitter has limited the number of tweets an account can send for years, 2,400 per day — or 100 per hour — is far more than most regular, human-curated accounts on the platform.

Accounts also ran into trouble when they tried to follow another Twitter user, receiving a message “You can’t follow more people at this time” with a link to the company’s follow restriction policy.

Twitter’s longstanding limit to the number of accounts a single user can follow in a single day is 400 — again, more than the average Twitter user can typically achieve on any given day.

It’s unclear what caused Wednesday’s crash, but Twitter’s engineers and experts have been warning that the platform has become increasingly at risk since Musk fired most of the people working to keep it running.

Back in November, engineers who left Twitter described to The Associated Press why they expected Twitter’s more than 230 million users to be rather unhappy, given that more than two-thirds of Twitter’s former Musk core service engineers had apparently left.

While they don’t expect a breakdown anytime soon, engineers say Twitter could get pretty rough around the edges — especially if Musk makes major changes without extensive off-platform testing.

A Twitter engineer who used to work on core services told The Associated Press in November that the engineering team cluster had shrunk from about 15 people before Musk — excluding the team leader, who was fired — to three or four people , and even more resigned.

Then more institutional knowledge that cannot be replaced overnight walks out the door.

“Everything can break down,” said the programmer. (Associated Press)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)