Twitter outage: what happened, when the service was restored, and more

Twitter is down across the world right now and we're busy digging into what has caused the widespread outage affecting at least the US and UK.

According to Downdetector, as many as 9,449 reports of Twitter error came in around 5PM EST. Many users were getting errors saying that they've reached their daily limits for tweets, something we can confirm. 

The problem seems to extent to both the Twitter mobile app as well as desktop users, and it is affecting retweets and DMs as well.

The hashtag #TwitterDown saw a similar spike on Twitter itself, indicating that at least some people were able to tweet through it.

The  story so far...

Twitter is still down! Kind of, depending on how you access it. According to the site Is It Down Right Now, Twitter is down as of the start of this Live Blog. We love covering Twitter drama, and we’ll be updating you with news on what’s happening with Twitter, whether this is part of a planned change event, or if something has gone horribly wrong. 

Right now you can still access Twitter.com from a desktop browser like Chrome. Some mobile users are reporting total failure when trying to access the site. Even if you can access Twitter, the trouble has only begun. 

You cannot send an immediate Tweet right now without getting a warning message. You can schedule a tweet for the future, even if it’s only one minute. You can’t retweet, but you can Like tweets. 

The problem started when users got hit with a brand new warning saying “You are over the daily limit for sending Tweets.” I’m guessing that Elon Musk is about to initiate a Tweet limit, and we’ll have the privilege of paying if we want to tweet more. My guess is that the feature rolled out early, or incomplete, or buggy, or all of the above. 

We will see if anything changes on Twitter.com and the mobile apps and keep you posted if Twitter or its ambition CEO have anything to say. 

Back up, but not for everyone

Some users are able to send tweets successfully now, but the site is still being reported as 'down' on Is It Down, and not all features appear to be working. However, it seems that the glitch was short-lived, but the real news is yet to come. 

Why is there a Tweet limit all of a sudden?

Even though Twitter appears to be crawling back to live, we have to question why there is a warning for a tweet limit all of a sudden. There have been numerous, questionable ways Elon Musk has been trying to monetize the platform. It seems that setting a Tweet limit would only serve this goal. 

Musk has in the past shown support for even longer tweets, up to thousands of characters or words long. Taking a restrictive stance now is not out of character, because the CEO's character is erratic. It just leaves us guessing. 

Twitter's PR department is Twitter, of course

I missed this earlier in the day, as I try to avoid Twitter while I'm working, but Twitter announced on Twitter already that there is a longer Tweet available for Twitter Blue users. 

It looks ridiculous, and it completely defeats the purpose of why I come to Twitter and not any other blogging site. 

Now the monetary grab makes more sense. Of course tweet limits are on the way. Musk and company want to destroy the free threads and replace them with these macro-blog posts instead. 

If you have a lot to say, it looks like you'll have to pay Twitter to get your point across in more than 240 characters. 

And we're back!

By the looks of things, Twitter is back up and running on mobile and desktop in both the US and UK. Downdetector complaints have dropped significantly, and we're able to access Twitter as normal.

Since the fix, Musk has also tweeted that Twitter's recommendation algorithm "should be fixed tomorrow."