By Ryan Mac and Kate Conger
Twitter users around the world reported that they could no longer post messages or send messages to one another on Wednesday, the latest in a series of glitches at the social media service owned by Elon Musk.
The problems began around 4:45 p.m. Eastern time, when users who tried posting messages saw a notification that said they were “over the daily limit for sending tweets.” Others found they were unable to follow new accounts, and some were logged out of their accounts altogether. Direct messages and the search function for GIFs also stopped working.
Downdetector, a service that collects user reports of outages, also said Twitter was experiencing problems. By 7 p.m. Eastern time, some users began tweeting again as features were partly restored.
The cause of the glitches was unclear. Twitter, at least, appeared to be able to tweet.
“Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you,” the company posted. “Sorry for the trouble.”
The company and Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Twitter has undergone significant changes since Musk bought the company in October. The billionaire has laid off or fired more than half of Twitter’s staff, leaving the company with about 2,200 employees, down from 7,500 at the time of the acquisition. Musk has also aggressively cut other costs and proposed new ways for the company to earn revenue.
The changes have led to confusion and occasional breakdowns in its service. Twitter users experienced outages in late December, after the company shuttered operations at one of its main data centers in Sacramento, California. That interruption, which lasted several hours, affected primarily people who used the application on desktop computers, logging them out or surfacing error messages when they tried to scroll their Twitter feeds.
Last month, users in Australia and New Zealand also reported Twitter outages that lasted more than half a day.
On Wednesday, users responded to the issues with disbelief and humor. Some asked whether their social media site of choice was really broken. Others speculated about what might have caused the glitches.
Some figured out ways to use the site despite the problems by employing Twitter’s scheduling function, which allowed them to publish messages to the site. That led to numerous jokes, since Twitter is known for its real-time nature and not premeditated posts.