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The Jokes Were Flying — Eventually — After Twitter Acted Funky For About An Hour Or So

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NBC

On Wednesday afternoon, Twitter — a service now owned by a guy whose electric cars keep malfunctioning and causing accidents — started acting funky. Starting around 4:45pm EST, users started noticing they could no longer post messages on one of the world’s most popular social media service. There was a workaround to get tweets live again, and once people discovered it, the jokes started flying well before the problems had mostly but not completely subsided.

Mid-afternoon, people who tweet a lot — or just happened to be tweeting then — got a strange message when they hit the “tweet” button: “You are over the limit of sending daily tweets.” The problem affected not only people who tweet too much but even those who had tweeted once or even zero times that day.

There was a fix: Instead of clicking on “tweet,” people could simply schedule their post for a minute later (provided they selected the correct date). Soon Twitter was alive again, mostly with people complaining about how it was broken.

To make matters fishier, the outage happened the same day as a splashy — and ultimately fruitless — House oversight committee hearing led by the MAGA wing of the chamber into Twitter’s alleged suppression of Hunter Biden dick pics. There was a lot of shouting, sometimes by elected lawmakers who had repeatedly heckled President Joe Biden at his State of the Union address the night before. But by the end of the day they had, as Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin put it, “turned up absolutely nothing.”

It’s unlikely the two incidents are related, but since, again, Twitter owner Elon Musk owns Tesla, some speculated on a connection.

It was bad timing in other ways, too.

Direct messages were also suddenly AWOL.

Some pointed out Twitter isn’t the only unreliable Musk product.

Those who figured out the workaround were quick to fling jokes.

Even Dictionary.com threw some shade.

Surely, some pointed out, the Musk die-hards weren’t giving up on their hero.

A bit before 6pm EST, things started getting back to normal.

Which prompted more jokes.

Of course, it’s unclear who saved the day.

As it happened, the outage happened mere hours after MAGA lawmakers, who failed to prove the government had coerced them into burying dick pics of the current president’s son, singled out Musk for saving Twitter from…well, from not having weird outages.