Panicked Elon Musk Asked Twitter Employees to Stop Building New Features as Site's Infrastructure Crumbles

"Please pause for now on new feature development..."

Falling Apart

If you were on Twitter at all yesterday evening, you may have noticed: it was broken. If you tried to tweet outright, you were hit with a pop-up that said you'd already reached your "daily limit," even if you hadn't tweeted at all that day.

People turned to scheduling their tweets, seemingly the only way to post on the platform at all. As if that wasn't enough, users found they were unable to follow other tweeters, while the platform's direct messaging feature crumbled pretty much entirely. You couldn't start a new message, and in some cases, users began to receive some, uh, unexpected messages.

"Got an empty DM from myself. I have the option to block me too," tweeted videogame historian Frank Cifaldi, upon receiving a blank direct message from... his own account. "This site rules."

Throughout it all, things were apparently not chill over at Twitter HQ. Twitter support posted a "sorry for the trouble" apology note, and according to Fortune, Twitter CEO Elon Musk sent a pretty clear drop-what-you're-doing email to Twitter's staffers around the time of the outage, urging them to forgo the development of any new features for the time being.

"Please pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness," reads the email, which was reviewed by Fortune, "especially with the Super Bowl coming up."

Scary Sunday

In a second email, also reviewed by Fortune, Musk reportedly added that Twitter "should also pause on transitioning away from" its data centers in Sacramento and Atlanta and "[reduce Google Cloud Platform] usage until at least next week."

Musk is certainly right to worry about getting his platform in working order for the Super Bowl, as major sporting events tend to drive significant spikes in usage. But thankfully for him, the platform does appear to be back on track today.

That said, last night's outage comes on the heels of a string of platform glitches and general chaos regarding a series of new product rollouts, most of which haven't exactly worked out on the first try. And backdropping these problems, of course, is the reality that Twitter teams are currently pretty thin, and reportedly attempting to work in conditions that don't exactly behoove productivity.

Anyway. Sending positive thoughts to the tiramisu that is Twitter's code, may it hold through Super Bowl Sunday.

READ MORE: Elon Musk emails Twitter staff to pause 'new feature development' during glitch that told users they were 'over the daily limit' and blocked them from posting