Many Twitter users reported issues on February 8, from outages to not being able to tweet except by scheduling or via an API; the issues seem to be mostly fixed
Shortly after Twitter launched its huge increase in max character count to 4,000 today, many users aren't able to tweet this afternoon.
9to5MacMichael Potuck
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter had already resolved a widespread website disruption in late 2022, while an earlier API v2 irregularity showed that failures could affect different parts of the service. The new incident matters because direct posting was impaired even as scheduling and API-based routes continued to work.
Related coverage later records timeline failures on both web and mobile, reinforcing a pattern of disruptions that do not necessarily affect every Twitter function at once.
First-order effects
Twitter users who relied on the primary compose flow were temporarily unable to publish normally, while users with scheduling tools or API access retained alternate posting paths.
The issue places Twitter's newly expanded posting capability alongside a reliability failure in the core action it is meant to support.
Second-order effects
Scheduling and API-based publishing tools become operational fallbacks during a direct-posting outage, giving their users continuity unavailable in Twitter's standard interface.
Repeated incidents spanning the website, engagement features, timelines, and APIs make Twitter's service reliability a concern across both consumer and developer-facing surfaces.
Third-order effects
If function-specific outages continue, Twitter's publishing ecosystem may become more dependent on redundant routes through third-party tools and APIs rather than a single first-party workflow.
The pattern points toward platform reliability being judged by whether core actions remain available across interfaces, not simply whether the service is online.
The trend: Twitter’s recurring, surface-specific disruptions illustrate how platform resilience increasingly depends on alternate access paths as much as the primary app and website.
SCOOP: Elon has emailed staff following the Twitter outage. “Please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up.”
new: as engineers worked to solve the outage, Musk told employees to pause new feature development in favor of maximizing stability ahead of the Super Bowl, historically Twitter's highest-grossing day of the year https://www.theinformation.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Twitter is decaying in exactly the way people who've worked in online services predicted. The timing has been off since the expectation was to see these cracks during the World Cup but the outcome is unsurprising. If even @jack has given up on Twitter, why are we still here?
Here's the inside situation: A Twitter employee told Fortune that the engineering Slack channels are “going crazy” & the team is floating various ideas around as to why this error has occurred, from changes to the free API feature to a data center outage. https://fortune.com/...
Today I learned @jack is no longer active on Twitter and instead posts on https://nostr.com/ Wild to see him roasting Twitter while still having $1 billion invested in it. If even he has lost faith in Twitter 2.0, you've gotta appreciate the dedication of the muskrats. https://tw…
updated story here, with lots of internal detail on the outage and notes on what this says about Twitter moving forward https://www.theinformation.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Not saying twitter is dead he'll fix this eventually, but imagine if Instagram and Facebook stopped rendering. Can you imagine what Mark Zuckerberg would do to the families of those responsible
if everyone can tweet during the super bowl the way they did the first time they thought to livetweet the super bowl or the oscars we can destroy twitter once and for all https://twitter.com/...
He sent a follow up email. “We should also pause on transitioning away from Sacramento, consolidating Atlanta and reducing GCP usage until at least next week.”
Hard not to notice the press all frothy about Twitter's recent challenges. Almost celebrating. Says a lot. Open season on @elonmusk. Even though few if any issues after eliminating >70% of headcount.