Instagram and Twitter appear to be suffering an outage after thousands of users reported problems with the two social media apps.
Down Detector, a website that tracks internet outages, showed a large spike in user glitch reports for Instagram beginning around 10:48am Pacific Time on Wednesday.
A similar spike was also visible for Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, and several other services, beginning around 12pm or 1pm.
Several reporters for The Independent were unable to tweet on Wednesday, instead getting an error message that said: “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”
Numerous Twitter users who were able to tweet said they were having trouble with Instagram, particularly with posting Instagram Stories, while users on Reddit said they were having trouble with Twitter.
The Twitter glitch appears to be surmountable by scheduling a tweet for the future, even if only one or two minutes into the future.
Twitter users have reported an increasing number of bugs since the site’s takeover last October by Elon Musk, who fired more than half of its staff including many who worked on core elements of its infrastructure.
The scale and depth of the cuts led many obsevers, as well as current and former employees, to warn that Twitter’s reliability might be compromised.
The Independent has asked for comment from Twitter and from Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
This story is developing and will be updated.