The Twitpocalypse may have begun, as datacenter migration reportedly founders

Glitches hit Elon’s social media mess, as it announces 4,000-character tweets for paying customers

Twitter suffered a panoply of significant glitches on Wednesday, reportedly coinciding with a consolidation of its datacenters and reducing its reliance on Google's cloud.

Some users were unable to post to the service and, when they tried to do so, were told they had exceeded Twitter's daily limit of 4,400 tweets – even if that was not the case. Others reported difficulties sending direct messages or adding new followers. That glitch was fixed after around 90 minutes.

Twitter glitch Feb 8 2023 – Click to enlarge

The second glitch – an inability to log into the Tweetdeck client Twitter runs and suggests for power tweeters – persisted for a couple more hours.

Twitter's status page did not report any issues – nor indeed any incidents in the last 180 days!

But reports have surfaced suggesting that the incident coincided with Twitter reducing its use of the Google Cloud Platform, and that owner and CEO Elon Musk has ordered that work – and creation of new features – to stop and for Twitter staff to focus instead on stability ahead of a likely usage spike during next week's Super Bowl.

One feature we know Twitter has just delivered is an increase in the length of tweets – from 280 characters to 4,000.

Or as the @twitter account put it, in its first tweet since December 2022:

more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more words more… https://t.co/0mcFJ1wwZK

— Twitter (@Twitter) February 8, 2023

The account for the Twitter Blue subscription service offered more detail, revealing that 4,000-character tweets will only be available to paying users.

Users will see only the first 280 characters of the colosso-tweets. For the interested, a "show more" button will reveal the rest of the text.

Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has made swingeing job cuts that sparked predictions the company may have insufficient technical staff to detect and prevent outages.

Until today, though, the former micro-blogging service has not really experienced major incidents on Musk's watch.

The Chief Twit hasn't commented on the matter in his own Twitter feed, preferring to focus on restoration of Twitter access in Türkiye after reports the service was unavailable.

Twitter has been informed by the Turkish government that access will be reenabled shortly

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 8, 2023

He also tweeted the following:

Going forward, Twitter will be broadly accepting of different values, rather than trying to impose its own specific values on the world

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 7, 2023

The above reflects Musk's view that Twitter's previous safety and content moderation policies were biased and suppressed free speech. ®