Alejandro Arrieche
Twitter suffered a global outage just a few hours ago according to reports sent by users to Down Detector shortly after the platform rolled out a new feature for Blue subscribers that allows them to publish longer tweets.
Many users reported that a message from the system was popping up alerting them that they had exceeded their daily tweet limit. The official Twitter Support account posted less than an hour ago that the company was aware of the issue and that it was working on solving it.
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 (@TwitterSupport) February 8, 2023
Virtually at the same time that the outage happened, the official account of Twitter Blue announced that subscribers could now publish tweets of up to 4,000 characters. The feature will only be available to US residents apparently as per the information provided by the Twitter Blue team.
Also read: Best Tech Stocks to Buy in February 2023
This implies a major change to the long-standing model of the micro-blogging platform that limited the number of characters per tweet to 280. Initially, users could only publish tweets of 140 characters and threads did not exist.
To avoid the need for scrolling endlessly to read multiple tweets, the platform has limited the number of displayed characters to 280 and is adding a “Show More” button that users can now click on to read the remaining portions of the text.
Change is the Norm at Elon’s Twitter
Twitter did not clarify if the outage had something to do with the rollout of this new feature but everything points in that direction or else it is quite a coincidence that both events took place at roughly the same time.
Meanwhile, even though the platform is working again for the most part, some users are still reporting issues with the direct messaging feature and some others are still getting the daily tweet limit exceeded alert.
This is yet another change introduced by Elon Musk’s Twitter. Just a few weeks ago, the company made a controversial move by shutting down the free access that developers had to the platform’s application programming interface (API) without formally notifying the parties affected.
Shortly afterward, the company added new clauses to its developer agreement including a ban on the use of the platform’s API to create alternate versions of the Twitter interface. The company’s motives are quite clear at the moment as Elon Musk is scrambling to monetize the platform in any way possible to cope with the exodus of advertisers that it experienced shortly after he took over.
Twitter finally announced that it was launching a paid API for third parties. The official launch date of this new feature is tomorrow and the company has not provided any details about its pricing or if access would be restricted.
Meanwhile, Musk later tweeted that they might also launch a lighter, read-only version of the API for harmless bots that create “good content” and that are highly regarded by the community.
Twitter is Facing Headwinds from All Directions
Reports indicate that Musk took on approximately $12.5 billion in debt to finance its acquisition of the micro-blogging platform founded by Jack Dorsey. Right after the transaction was settled, advertisers shut down their campaigns amid concerns that Musk’s erratic behavior could end up hurting their brands.
Musk has made some controversial moves since he appointed himself as CEO of the social media company. As first order of business, he laid off half of the company’s workforce to bring down operating expenses.
In addition, he started to auction some of the company’s furniture including the Twitter bird statue that decorated the firm’s headquarters in San Francisco. In addition, the firm is apparently struggling to stay current with its landlords and vendors as indicated by various lawsuits brought forth against the business in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
Experts have warned that Twitter’s technical issues could start to surface progressively as the departure of several top software engineers may have made its systems more vulnerable than ever to glitches and malfunctions.
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Alejandro Arrieche.
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