TweetDeck is DOWN: Dashboard crashes as Twitter limits the number of posts users can read

Twitter users who rely on the dashboard app TweetDeck to manage their accounts are being left frustrated this morning.

The widely-used app appears to have crashed worldwide, although Twitter itself now looks to be functioning, following its own issues at the weekend.

TweetDeck users took to Twitter to share their anger, with one sarcastically posting ‘Thanks for an awesome tweetdeck’ with a shot of the app’s broken interface. 

Another person claimed the only column working for them on TweetDeck is for Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s tweets. 

It follows Musk’s plans to limit the amount of tweets users can see on the platform if they are not signed up for Twitter’s paid subscription service.

TweetDeck was acquired by Twitter for $40 million in 2011 after operating as its own independent application.

It consists of a series of customisable columns, which can be set up to display a user’s Twitter timeline, mentions, direct messages, hashtags or even all tweets by a single user. 

TweetDeck is designed for desktop and typically displays many tweets on the screen at any one time – usually 20 or even more. 

So it’s possible Monday’s problems are related to Musk’s new measures to limit the amount of tweets people can see if they are not paying for Twitter. 

One user questioned ‘if Elon has killed off TweetDeck’ which would no longer make Twitter ‘a place for breaking news’. 

They continued: ‘I’d actually pay for a stupid blue tick if it granted TweetDeck access.’

Another asked: ‘Did Musk destroyed #Tweetdeck in his Idiocy?’ 

Yet another person having issues posted a screenshot of their TweetDeck showing only Musk’s tweets appearing. 

They posted it with the caption: ‘One Tweetdeck column is now working. Just one. Guess which one?’ 

It’s already known the billionaire CEO created a special system to show users all his tweets first, after a tweet about the Super Bowl didn’t do as well as he had hoped. 

Elon Musk – who regularly takes to Twitter to provide updates about the platform – is yet to comment on the outage. 

A multitude of changes introduced by Musk since he took over Twitter in October are thought to be part of attempts to get users to subscribe to Twitter Blue, the platform’s monthly subscription service. 

In the UK, Twitter Blue costs £9.60 per month for desktop and £11 for iOS and Android and adds a blue tick next to a user’s name, to indicate that their account is ‘verified’. 

Other features that are exclusive to Twitter Blue subscribers include the ability to edit tweets, undo a tweet immediately after posting it and post tweets up to 280 characters. 

Now, Musk has revealed that non-Twitter Blue subscribers are limited to reading 600 tweets per day, compared with 6,000 for subscribers. 

Meanwhile, newly-created Twitter accounts that are unverified can see even fewer tweets – only up to 300 per day. 

He said the new limits would ‘address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation’ but called them ‘temporary’. 

It comes after problems with the main Twitter site at the weekend, sending millions of users into overdrive as they were left unable to search the site. 

Users were told that their ‘rate limit’ was exceeded, although it is unclear what exactly this meant and what caused the issue to occur. 

It follows a Twitter outage in June, another outage at the start of May, and two outages in the first week of March alone. 

Since mass staff layoffs at Twitter, experts have raised questions about the ability of Musk and the skeleton staff to keep the site online – which Musk has routinely denied. 

In an interview with the BBC in April, Musk confirmed that about 80 per cent of Twitter staff have been axed since he took over at the helm – including Twitter’s global communications team.