Twitter on Wednesday began erroneously placing limits on the frequency of tweets an account can send, with users operating both individual and business accounts receiving error messages about exceeding the “daily limit for sending Tweets.”
The company has limits to the number of direct messages and tweets that a user can send per day, according to a page on Twitter’s Help Center site. The daily tweet limit is 2,400, but the site notes, “the daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals.” Retweets also count toward that limit.
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It’s not immediately clear how many tweets are allowed within the “semi-hourly intervals,” and individual and business accounts — including The Hollywood Reporter‘s Twitter account — received the error message when attempting to tweet more than once in at least an hour.
According to the Help Page, users hitting limits will be allowed to “try again in a few hours after the limit period has elapsed,” though it is not clear what exactly the time period is. On Wednesday afternoon, some Twitter users were able to find workarounds by scheduling tweets in advance to circumvent the “daily limit” error.
“Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Sorry for the trouble. We’re aware and working to get this fixed,” the Twitter Support account tweeted as users across the site were being prevented from tweeting multiple times.
Other limits outlined in the Help Page site include a maximum of 500 direct messages per day and a follow limit of 400 accounts per day, though additional site rules around “aggressive following behavior” may impact that number for individuals. Twitter also capped the total number an individual user can follow to 5,000, and attempts to follow more accounts will be “limited by account-specific ratios,” the site said.
Twitter, which no longer has a formal communications team, did not respond to a request for clarification. The Help Page site said the limits are meant to “alleviate some of the strain on the behind-the-scenes part of Twitter and reduce downtime and error pages.”
Feb. 13 at 2:50 p.m. Updated with a statement from the Twitter Support account and to clarify that the Twitter limits impacting users were due to a system error.
