(Reuters) - Some Twitter users were unable to tweet on Wednesday, prematurely encountering a message that said "You are over the daily limit for sending Tweets."
Twitter was down for about 9,000 users in the United States at 5 p.m. Eastern time, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. The number of outages declined to 2,500 by 6 p.m. Eastern.
"Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Sorry for the trouble. We're aware and working to get this fixed," tweeted Twitter's support account on Wednesday.
The bug comes as billionaire owner Elon Musk has slashed Twitter's staff since taking over the company in October, leading to concerns about the viability of the service with fewer engineers.
The Information reported Musk told Twitter employees on Wednesday to pause on new feature development "in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up."
(Reporting by Khushi Mandowara in Bengaluru and Sheila Dang in Dallas; Editing by Anil D'Silva and Christopher Cushing)