Twitter Limiting How Many Times Accounts Can Tweet a Day

Amid a series of platform disruptions Wednesday afternoon, it was revealed Twitter is in the process of limiting how many tweets somebody can send in a day. As a part of the kerfuffle, users of the microblogging service were getting warnings that they were "over the daily limit for sending Tweets," despite not tweeting anything during the day. Upon some further investigation, it seems as if the warnings were a bug affecting those at a far lower tweet count than the new threshold.

Now, the Twitter Help Center says accounts will be given a 2,400 tweet limited every date. Beyond that, per-hour tweets are broken into smaller increments, meaning there is now a rule in place governing how many tweets an account can make in a single hour. Judging by the site, retweets also count towards both limits and a certain number isn't yet available regarding how many tweets one can make in an hour, exactly.

Furthermore, limits are now in place for direct messages and follows as well. Now, Twitter users can send just 500 direct messages per day in addition to following 400 accounts daily. Accounts on the platform can now follow just 5,000 people, regardless whether it's a business or personal account.

According to Fortune reporter Kylie Robison, new Twitter owner Elon Musk sent an email to Twitter employees ordering them to stop new feature development for the foreseeable future.

SCOOP: Elon has emailed staff following the Twitter outage.

“Please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up.”

— Kylie Robison (@kyliebytes) February 8, 2023

What do you do if you hit Twitter's limits?

You wait. As of now, the platform says you must simply wait a day to continue making tweets. "If you do reach a limit, we'll let you know with an error message telling you which limit you've hit. For limits that are time-based (like the Direct Messages, Tweets, changes to account email, and API request limits), you'll be able to try again after the time limit has elapsed," the Help Center it explains.

It adds, "The Tweet limit of 2,400 updates per day is further broken down into semi-hourly intervals. If you hit your account update/Tweet limit, please try again in a few hours after the limit period has elapsed."