Twitter went down because an employee accidentally deleted data, and there was nobody left on the team responsible due to Elon Musk's cuts, report says

• On Wednesday, Twitter users were faced with the errant warning: "You are over the daily limit for sending tweets."
• That's because an employee accidentally deleted data about these limits, Platformer reported.

Twitter's major outage on Wednesday took place because an employee mistakenly deleted important data from an internal service, according to tech newsletter Platformer.

The outage left users unable to tweet or retweet, and being faced with the error message: "You are over the daily limit for sending tweets."

According to Twitter's website, that limit is supposed to be 2,400 tweets a day, but users were still presented with the error if they hadn't tweeted at all. In a private message seen by Insider's Kali Hays, one Twitter employee described it as "a massive outage."

About 90 minutes after users began reporting problems, the company tweeted: "Twitter may not be working as expected for some of you. Sorry for the trouble. We're aware and working to get this fixed."

Platformer reported Thursday that this outage happened because data from Twitter's internal service for these rate limits was deleted by accident, and the team which worked on that service had left the company in November.

That month, Musk sent all Twitter employees an ultimatum at midnight, telling them to commit to working "extremely hardcore," or leave the company. It told staff they needed to work "long hours at a high intensity" in order to "build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0."

Since Musk took over the company, employee numbers have fallen more than two-thirds, from over 7,000 to around 2,300, per the billionaire himself.

He has also introduced dramatic cost-cutting measures, like allegedly withholding rent on the company's offices, according to lawsuits filed by Twitter's San Francisco landlord, and King Charles III's Crown Estate, which owns Twitter's London office.

Marc Andreessen – the billionaire investor whose venture-capital fund invested $400 million into Musk's takeover of Twitter – has also complained directly to him about frequent changes to the platform, per Insider's Kali Hays. After Wednesday's outage, Musk emailed Twitter staff telling them to "pause new feature development" in order to ensure "system stability and robustness," Fortune first reported.

The outage also drew criticism from Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, who previously cheered Musk's takeover.

Twitter did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.