Twitter experiences widespread outage

Twitter was experiencing widespread outages Wednesday evening, with thousands of users encountering error messages as they tried to access key features on the site. 

Users reported receiving error messages saying they had exceeded the social media site’s daily limit for tweets, which company rules set at 2,400 separate tweets per day. 

Users also reported seeing error messages when trying to use direct messages. “TwitterDown,” “TwitterDMs” and “Did Twitter” were trending in the United States as of Wednesday night. 

“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 tweeted.

Downdetector, which tracks reported interruptions on the platform, saw a stark spike in Twitter issues in the early evening on Wednesday, with thousands of users reporting problems. 

The outages came hours after Twitter announced it was expanding its character limit for subscribers of the paid service Twitter Blue from 280 to 4,000 characters per post. 

Twitter has been under scrutiny since Tesla CEO Elon Musk acquired the social media site in the fall and quickly implemented controversial changes, including tweaking its user verification feature to let paid Twitter Blue subscribers get the coveted “verified” check mark, not just users who cleared authentication requirements. 

Musk also moved to slash Twitter’s staff and scale back on content moderation, prompting concerns about the site’s operations. 

Fortune reported Wednesday evening that Musk sent an email to staff urging them to “please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up.”

Three former Twitter executives answered questions about the platform’s content moderation on a 2020 story about President Biden’s son Hunter Biden at a hearing Wednesday in the Republican-led House Oversight and Accountability Committee.