Twitter Breaks Right Before Nintendo Direct, Chaos Ensues

Update: 2/8/2023 5:58 p.m. ET: Twitter appears to be working normally again.

Moments before the February 8 Nintendo Direct kicked off at 5 p.m ET, Twitter broke—no one could send tweets. At the time of writing, it is still broken.

Every user, no matter their output, seems to be getting an error when trying to send tweets that reads, “You are over the daily limit.” Clicking the link that pops up under the error takes you to a Twitter help post about current Twitter limits, which include 500 DMs per day, and 2,400 Tweets—a limit most of us aren’t getting within a country mile of. It’s clearly not that we’ve all reached these daily limits, but rather that something at Twitter HQ is broken. It certainly seems like the breakdown of sending tweets is tied to the release of its new feature:4,000 character tweets, which no one asked for, and which debuted a couple of hours before everything went to shit. Retweets and quote tweets also seem to be broken at the time of publication.

Currently, the only workaround to getting tweets up is scheduling them.

Hilariously, Twitter broke just before the highly anticipated Nintendo Direct began, breaking the storied tradition of games Twitter live-tweeting every moment of the stream. How would we call this Direct “mid” if we couldn’t do it on Twitter, mere seconds into the show?

Naturally, we all handled it with poise and decorum, though scheduling your scathing commentary is so much less satisfying than typing “GameBoy Advance games are the highlight, lol” and hitting send. It’s also hard to tell if you’ve actually sent a fire tweet since no one can RT in agreeance. RIP.

the fact that elon broke twitter during a nintendo direct should be a crime

— sloane (@skipper) February 8, 2023

how the FUCK are you people still posting about video games

— rachel (@rachelmillman) February 8, 2023

.@elonmusk hey there's a #NintedoDirect happening now.

— IGN (@IGN) February 8, 2023

i am personally crying and throwing up!!! pic.twitter.com/0txv5A1tXr

— roslyn 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸 (@roslyntalusan) February 8, 2023

Metroid Prime Remastered was just shadow dropped digitally today!

That's pretty awesome!

— Stealth (@Stealth40k) February 8, 2023

nintendo was really like 'this is it, we're dropping the big ones, suprise metroid prime remaster drop, date Advance Wars again, Xenoblade DLC tease, Splatoon DLC tease, gameboy games on switch online, new Layton, Tears of the Kingdom date trailer' and then Elon killed Twitter pic.twitter.com/KP8TvmWNZ6

— James Whitbrook (@Jwhitbrook) February 8, 2023

https://twitter.com/embed/status/1623452619791380482

We can all still head to Twitter to share our excitement, frustration, or disappointment (as made evident above), but it’s unclear when Twitter will be back to normal. For now, schedule your hot takes for one minute later than when you come up with them!