Culture

Twitter Broke On The Launch Day Of Its Biggest New Feature

Engineers were reportedly "going crazy" over the site issues.

by Charles Rushforth  9 February 2023

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If you suffer from rogue eye twitches or a fanatical obsession with M3GAN — you know, the usual symptoms of being extremely online — then you probably noticed that Twitter has been acting up today.

Twitter users were greeted with the digital equivalent of being denied service at a bar via a blunt warning they had exceeded the daily limit for tweets. Seeing as this daily limit is set at 2,400 posts per day and it was only 9am, this was the first red flag that something fishy was going on at bird HQ.

Then things got worse. Reports started flooding in about users being unable to react to other people’s tweets or use the direct message function, while third-party tools like Tweet Deck simply weren’t working at all. As Twitter support tried to get on top of the problem, users eventually discovered a workaround that let them post via scheduling a tweet.

So, what went wrong? Well, funnily enough, today was supposed to be the launch of a controversial Twitter Blue feature that allows users to post tweets spanning over 4000 characters. It follows that attempting to implement this feature might have led to everyone else’s Twitter accounts getting bricked.

According to a leaked employee statement obtained by Fortune, engineers were today “going crazy” on official company slack channels, speculating that a cost-saving transition to a new company data centre could also be behind the problem.

While Twitter CEO Elon Musk has remained silent about the outage, a memo also seen by Fortune alleges he directed employees away from working on new changes to the social media platform in favour of stability.

“Please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up,” Elon Musk is alleged to have said in a memo.

While ruining Twitter is one thing, I’m very confident in the tech billionaire’s vision for a “fully sustainable energy future”. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?