Twitter announced it will increase the character limit in a tweet, from 280 to 4,000. The initial limit of a post was 140 characters and doubled in 2017 to the current maximum of 280 characters.
Starting Wednesday, Twitter users who have a Blue subscription can post tweets up to 4,000 characters long, more than 14 times the previous limit. “Need more than 280 characters to express yourself? we know that lots of you do… and while we love a good thread, sometimes you just want to Tweet everything all at once. we get that. so we’re introducing longer Tweets!” the company announced.
While the upgrade will apply to Blue US accounts,” anyone and everyone can read them. you can reply to, retweet, and quote Tweet a longer Tweet, no matter if you’re a Twitter Blue subscriber or not.” The Blue subscription is available only in a few countries and offers access to some exclusive features, in the US this costs $8 per month, or $84 per year and as per reports only 180,000 people in the US have been paying for a Twitter subscription by mid-January.
As the platform introduced the expanded limit, it suffered some technical issues “Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Sorry for the trouble. We’re aware and working to get this fixed,” said Ella Irwin, the company’s head of safety. Elon Musk sent an email to the staff saying “Please pause for now on new feature development in favour of maximising system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up.” The Super Bowl kicks off this weekend in Arizona, on Sunday 12 with Rihanna performing in the Halftime.
Meanwhile, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other apps have also all reported outages as per Down Detector, so it may be server-related.
Source:wsj.com
