Twitter Reaches Maximum Tweet Capacity

April 1, 2014 — by Per Christensson

Twitter announced today it unexpectedly reached the maximum number of tweets. The popular social networking service can no longer accept new posts from its users. Twitter's technical team has issued an official statement saying, "The system is full."

When asked how this happened, Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey said they vastly underestimated how often people would post updates on Twitter. "We designed Twitter as a platform for sharing profound thoughts and ideas," stated Dorsey. "We had no idea people would publish updates about the sandwiches they are eating or their dog's half birthdays." Williams said unimportant tweets now make up 99.98% of updates published on Twitter.

"Based on our original estimates, we expected to run out of tweet space in the year 2134. We were off by 120 years," stated co-founder Biz Stone. "In retrospect, we should have made Twitter more scalable." Co-founder Noah Glass also expressed remorse in their oversight. "Several consultants suggested we design the service to be flexible, scalable, and extensible. However, those all sounded like buzzwords, so we dismissed them."

Shocked analysts are trying to figure out what to make of Twitter's future. "This sure is a darned thing to happen just a few months after the company went public, said Piper Jaffray analyst Craig Johnson. "Clearly Twitter will need to find other ways to grow outside social media, which happens to be their only industry." He maintained a Strong Buy rating of Twitter (TWTR) in light of the recent news.

While engineers are unable to expand Twitter's capacity, they are working on other ways to alleviate the problem. Some are considering deleting old tweets. One technician even suggested deleting the entire database. "After all, what would really be lost? #nothing," he remarked. Another developer suggested reducing the maximum number of characters per tweet from 140 to just 10, so this problem won't happen again for a long time.

While Twitter's woes may seem like good news for Facebook, the other popular website appears to have its own problems. Founder Mark Zuckerberg just announced the Timeline feature was accidentally programmed to expire on January 1, 2015. When asked what will happen then, Zuckerberg said, "Besides all the accounts being deleted, I don't know." At least for the next few months, users will have some place to post frivolous comments about their lives.

Happy April Fools.