It’s one of the most influential and powerful companies/websites/app in the 21st century, a cultural trendsetter that has toppled governments, created celebrities overnight and disseminated stories from people around the world from all walks of life. It’s also the birthplace of memes, dance trends, music challenges, and most of what we call ‘fun’ in the digital age.
Yes, Twitter is a lot of things, but one thing it isn’t is perfect: of all the social media platforms to exist, Twitter is probably the one that encounters the most trouble. It makes sense, though: because of how simple it is to use, more people use it, meaning the chances of it crashing are higher.
We’ve gathered some of the most common problems people encounter and fixed it with simple, easy-to-follow steps:
Issue: Twitter Video Won’t Upload
If you can’t upload your video to Twitter, the first thing you should do is check your internet connection. Seriously. It sounds like a no-brainer, but a lot of people who encounter this problem are also coincidentally using a slow internet connection. Check your browser or your mobile data and see if it’s running properly. Apply a power cycle (i.e. turn it on and off again) on both your phone and your router (if applicable), and try again.
If it’s still not working, check your video: usually, if a Twitter video won’t upload, it’s usually because it doesn’t fit the required specs. Often, people forget that there is a Twitter video length limit of two minutes and twenty seconds or a Twitter video file size limit of 512MB. Make sure you check the minimum/maximum resolutions and bitrates as well. And remember MP4 and MOV files only.
Issue: Twitter Photos Won’t Load
Setting aside connectivity issues, photos on Twitter might fail to load due to a number of reasons, the most common being a full browser cache. A browser cache is a folder in your browser app that stores bits and pieces of information about the pages it visits. It does this so that, the next time you visit that page, it can load faster.
When a browser cache is full, however, the opposite happens: because there’s too much information in the folder, the browser has a harder time sorting things out, slowing downloading times and making it much more frustrating. This can happen with smartphones as well.
Try clearing your browser and smartphone’s caches and try loading up Twitter again. This should help with loading issues, although, depending on your internet connection, it might making loading times longer.
Issue: Twitter Itself Won’t Load
If you’re accessing Twitter from the mobile app and it keeps crashing/refusing to open, it might be best to check the version. Head over to the Apple Store or the Google Play store and make sure that your version of Twitter is the latest one. If it isn’t, update it ASAP and then try again.
If it’s still refusing to load, try to uninstall and reinstall the app. This usually makes sure that any file that corrupted has been deleted successfully and replaced with a fresh batch of code. And don’t worry: your personal info is saved on the cloud, so you won’t have to worry about your account getting deleted.
If the app opens but Twitter isn’t loading tweets, the site might be down. Use a third-party site like Outage Report to make sure that the problem isn’t just coming from your end (misery loves company, after all).
Issue: Twitter Isn’t Loading Tweets
Again, check your internet connection: more often than not, a slow internet connection is the likely culprit when apps and browsers don’t work. If it is working and Twitter is having trouble loading tweets, or if it displays a “Something Went Wrong” or “Can’t Retrieve Tweets” message, then there might be something wrong with Twitter’s servers themselves. This can also happen to your own timeline, with some users reporting that their entire Twitter feed had been (temporarily) deleted. If this happens*, wait a few minutes for Twitter’s servers to boot back up, and try again.
But here’s a curious issue: some Twitter updates, like the one in August of 2017, rendered the app useless on most Sony smartphones. That’s because a piece of code in the update, which was meant to optimize Twitter’s camera, didn’t mesh well with Sony’s native programming, causing the app to malfunction on that particular smartphone model. Go online and check to see if other people who are using the same smartphone as you are encountering the same issue. If it’s phone-specific, your best bet is to wait for another update from Twitter.
*If you’re afraid of losing all your Twitter data, request for a copy of your Twitter archive by going to Settings and then clicking Request Archive. Depending on how active you are, this process can take minutes, hours, even days. Twitter will notify you when your archive is ready, and it will also send a downloadable ‘hard’ copy to your email in the form of a spreadsheet file.
Issue: Twitter Isn’t Loading Tweets of a Specific Profile
Big oof! When this happens, it usually means one of two things: first, the profile you’re checking might have been deleted or deactivated, which means that all their tweets are inaccessible as well. The second, slightly more painful meaning, is that this person has blocked you. Twitter won’t let you know if someone has blocked you; they just kind of let you find out on your own.
Obviously, your first clue that someone has blocked you should be that their tweets are no longer appearing on your timeline. Beyond this most obvious observation, that profile in question will also no longer appear on your ‘following’ or ‘followers’ list. Tweets of theirs that you’ve replied to will also not show up on your Tweets and Replies tab.
Of course, the best way to find out if you’ve been blocked: visit the other person’s profile. If a message appears saying, “You have been blocked from following this account at the request of the user.”, well then you have your answer.
