Twitter users unable to work on Musk-owned platform

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Twitter users unable to work on Musk-owned platform

Many Twitter users were unable to tweet, follow accounts or access their direct messages on Wednesday as the Elon Musk-owned platform experienced a slew of technical problems.

Some of you may not be able to work on Twitter as expected. The company tweeted from its support account that it was working to get this fixed.

More details were not available Wednesday, and an email seeking comment from the company's press account went unanswered. Twitter has dissolved its media relations team.

Users noticed a problem when they tried to send tweets and received a message saying they had reached their tweet limit. For years, Twitter has limited the number of tweets an account can send, but it is over 2,400 per day — or 100 an hour — far more than most regular human-run accounts on the platform.

Users had trouble getting a message You are unable to follow more people at this time with a link to the company's policy on follow limits when they tried to follow another Twitter user.

More than a regular Twitter user would reach on any given day, there is a long-standing limit on how many accounts a single user can follow in a single day.

It is not clear what caused Wednesday's meltdown, but Twitter engineers and experts have warned that the platform is at an increased risk of fraying, since Musk fired most of the people who worked on keeping it running.

While they don't anticipate near-term collapse, the engineers said that Twitter could get very rough at the edges, especially if Musk makes major changes without much off-platform testing.

One Twitter engineer who had worked in core services told the AP in November that engineering team clusters were down from 15 people pre-Musk — not including team leaders who had been laid off before even more resignations.

Then more institutional knowledge that can't be replaced overnight walked out of the door.

Everything could break, the programmer said.