Leaked Elon Musk email to Twitter employees reveals why Twitter went down today

Twitter went down this evening and users across the world were unable to send messages, follow other users or access DM’s and they and received an error message informing them that they were “over the daily limit” around half an hour later, many users were able to send tweets again, but all users are still unable to send direct messages and follow other users.

“Please pause for now on new feature development in favour of maximising system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up,” Musk wrote in an email to Twitter employees around the time of the outage. In a follow-up email, Musk wrote, Twitter “should also pause on transitioning away from Sacramento, consolidating Atlanta,” which are data centres Twitter uses, “and reducing Google Cloud Platform usage until at least next week.”

The messages appear to be part of a widespread outage at the social media platform amid deep cost-cutting and tumultuous management under Musk, who acquired the company in November.

While multiple users reported the error message when they tried to tweet on Wednesday, some users noted that they were still able to send scheduled tweets via third parties or using desktop.

A Twitter employee revealed to a Silicon Valley based publication that the engineering Slack channels were “going crazy” and the teams were floating various ideas around as to why this error occurred, from changes to the free API feature, which allows outside developers to access Twitter data, to a data centre outage.

Update at midnight (GMT) users in Ireland are now able to access DM’s again.

Meanwhile, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey was posting a bit of banter about Twitter going down on the alternative social media platform Nostr.com.

Elon Musk is clearly very savvy at manipulating the media to hang off his coattails and effortlessly get PR, I wouldn’t even put it past him intentionally creating the outage today knowing full well he will get instant global press coverage and no news is bad news and all that good stuff!

This is clearly another episode in the ongoing rollercoaster tenure of Elon Musk as owner of Twitter.
He recently revealed he would be sunsetting legacy verification. Which obviously alienates many super users, I truly believe Elon should not surround himself with yes men and form a focus group of Twitter users around the world, as clearly nearly all of the previous rash changes have caused problems.

To read my Interview with Twitter cofounder Biz Stone see the Twitter thread below.