Twitter was broken, and it was great

The platform is broken, and we are free

For a brief moment of bliss on Friday, you couldn’t tweet on Twitter. On DownDetector, the service showed a spike in problems over the last hour or so. Tweets sent bounced right back; retweets were also limited.

But there was still a secret way to tweet: members of The Verge, as well as other news organizations and avid Twitter users, discovered that scheduling tweets let you successfully get your message out there. (You likely needed to use Twitter’s web app — hit the three little dots underneath the tweet box — or TweetDeck.)

It’s unclear what the cause was, but a Twitter PM said the company was working on it:

Twitter’s status page said it’s “a possible system irregularity currently affecting all data products and real time APIs.”

Twitter tells The Verge, “We made a change and some mistakes were in the code. To fix it, we undid the change.” The company also pointed us to a Twitter Support announcement about the fix, which appears to have gone out shortly after 5PM ET:

You might be experiencing trouble sending new Tweets, but we’re working on fixing this now. Sorry for the interruption and we’ll let you know when things are back to normal.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) February 7, 2020

While my co-workers complain about not being able to tweet, it’s worth asking if anyone truly needs to. A Twitter without retweets or hot takes? Sounds kind of nice, actually.

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