Instagram and Twitter appear to suffer outage as users find they are unable to post

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Twitter and Instagram appear to be suffering outages after thousands of users reported problems with the two social media apps.

Down Detector, a website that tracks internet outages, showed a large spike in user glitch reports for Instagram beginning around 10.48am Pacific Time on Wednesday.

A similar spike was also visible for Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and several other services, beginning around 12pm or 1pm.

Several reporters for The Independent were unable to tweet on Wednesday, instead getting an error message that said: “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.” The usual daily limit is 2,400 tweets.

Numerous Twitter users who were able to tweet said they were having trouble with Instagram, particularly with posting Instagram Stories, while users on Reddit said they were having trouble with Twitter.

Twitter later confirmed the outage, saying via its official account: “Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Sorry for the trouble. We're aware and working to get this fixed.”

All the outages appeared to be resolved as of Wednesday evening.

The Twitter glitch, while it lasted, was surmountable by scheduling a tweet for the future, even if only one or two minutes into the future.

Twitter users have reported an increasing number of bugs since the site’s takeover last October by Elon Musk, who fired more than half of its staff including many who worked on core elements of its infrastructure.

The scale and depth of the cuts led many obsevers, as well as current and former employees, to warn that Twitter’s reliability might be compromised.

According to Fortune, Mr Musk later sent an email to staff that said: “Please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up.”

He then sent a follow-up email saying: “We should also pause on transitioning away from Sacramento, consolidating Atlanta and reducing GCP usage until at least next week.”

“Sacramento” and “Atlanta” most likely refer to some of Twitter’s data centres, while “GCP” is shorthand for Google’s cloud service provider. The follow-up suggests that the glitch may have been related to Mr Musk’s ongoing efforts to lower Twitter’s overheads by streamlining its backend infrastructure.

Twitter also recently said it would cut its daily tweet limit from 2,400 to 1,500, part of broad changes to its developer interface that will cut off access for thousands of academics, app makers, and non-spam bot accounts.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Twitter, which no longer has a press department following Mr Musk’s cuts, also did not respond to a request for comment.