On Wednesday, thousands of Twitter users experienced difficulties while using the platform as the Elon Musk-owned social media site started allowing paying subscribers to post tweets up to 4,000 characters. Twitter acknowledged the issue and stated they were working to resolve it. The disruptions caused a spike in complaints on the website, Down detector, and continued for a couple of hours.

Twitter users reported issues such as being unable to post messages, being informed that they had exceeded their daily tweet limit, and difficulties in sending direct messages. To reduce operational stress, Twitter had implemented a daily tweet limit of 2,400 tweets. The disruptions also affected Tweet Deck, a widely used dashboard for managing and viewing Twitter accounts.

The issue arose on the same day Twitter added the length perk to its Blue subscription service, costing $8 a month in the US. Twitter Blue subscribers can now post tweets up to 4,000 characters, far exceeding the 280-character limit for non-paying users. Twitter assured its users that, “Twitter is still Twitter” and that longer tweets would still be capped at 280 characters on the timeline with a “Show more” prompt to view the full tweet.

Late last year, Musk reduced Twitter’s workforce, which raised concerns about the platform’s ability to run smoothly with limited engineering talent. On Wednesday, US tech media reported that Musk had instructed Twitter staff to prioritize troubleshooting over developing new features.