Twitter outage: Users unable to tweet, access direct messages

On Wednesday, Twitter experienced widespread technical problems, as many users complained that they couldn't post updates, follow accounts or access their direct messages.

Users first noticed the issue when they tried to send tweets and got a message saying they had reached their "tweet limit." Some also had issues when they tried to follow another Twitter user and received the message "You are unable to follow more people at this time" with a link to Twitter's policy on following limits.

Addressing the issue, the Elon Musk-owned platform sent a message from its support account saying, "Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Sorry for the trouble. We're aware and working to get this fixed," Twitter support said. The reasons for the outage are unknown.

While Twitter has for years limited the count of tweets an account can send, it's 2,400 per day, or 100 per hour, far more than most regular human-run accounts share on the platform. Twitter's longstanding limit on how many accounts users can follow in one single day is 400. So, again, more than a normal Twitter user would typically reach on any given day. Engineers and experts employed by the company have been warning that the platform is at greater risk of fraying since Musk laid off most of the people who worked to keep it running.