Twitter goes down worldwide just minutes after launching expanded tweet counts [U: Fixed]

February 9, 2023

2 min read

Shortly after Twitter launched its huge increase in max character count to 4,000 today, many users aren’t able to tweet this afternoon. It’s unclear for now if the two are related but the timing comes right after a notable spike in long tweets.

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Update 3:11 pm PT: The outage appears to be almost fixed with downtime reports dipping under 4,000 on Down Detector. We’re seeing tweets from personal accounts working again at 9to5Mac.

Following the outage, Fortune reporter Kylie Robison has heard Elon Musk emailed this to Twitter staff: “Please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up.”

He reportedly also followed up with “We should also pause on transitioning away from Sacramento, consolidating Atlanta and reducing GCP usage until at least next week.”

At the time of writing, Down Detector has seen almost 10,000 reports of users having trouble with Twitter.

Many are unable to tweet and seeing this error message:

We’re sorry, we weren’t able to send your Tweet. Would you like to retry or save this Tweet in drafts?

Other users are seeing a different error message: “You are over the daily limit for sending Tweets.”

Interestingly, it looks like scheduling a tweet is a workaround for the downtime and tweeting via API is still working for now.

Notably, Twitter launching the supersized character count expansion to 4,000 caused a big spike in activity today. But for now, it remains unclear if that is what has caused the outage.

We’ll update this article as we learn more.

Is Twitter down for you? Let us know in the comments.