Twitter users temporarily unable to post in latest outage since Musk takeover

Twitter users were unable to post instantly on the website for almost an hour, in the latest outage to hit the social media platform since billionaire Elon Musk’s $44bn takeover.

From around 10pm GMT on Wednesday, users attempting to tweet were informed by the platform they had hit their daily limit – despite many of them reporting having not tweeted at all that day.

The outage affected not just new tweets but retweets and replies. Users also reported not being able to access their direct messages.

Some users discovered a workaround by scheduling tweets one minute into the future. The service eventually returned at nearly 11pm GMT, however at the time of reporting, direct messages were still missing.

At the time of reporting, Tweetdeck – a Twitter-owned service that allows users to view multiple columns of Twitter in browsers – remained down. There has been speculation that the product will become exclusive to Twitter Blue subscribers, but the company has yet to announce whether that is the case.

Since Musk took over the company, Twitter no longer has a press department, but the Guardian sent questions to an email address the company has previously used to field press inquiries.

US tech publication The Information reported Musk told Twitter staff to pause “new feature development” to maximise stability on the platform amid the outage.

The disruption came just hours after Twitter rolled out a new product to Twitter Blue subscribers that allows them to send tweets with up to 4,000 characters. The company was also in the process of ending its free access to the application programming interface (API) on 9 February.

The change will cut off a wide variety of services including Twitter thread readers, automated replies, and automatic tweet delete services.