New York (AFP) - Tens of thousands of Twitter users on Wednesday reported technical problems, most notably their inability to post tweets, coinciding with the day set for the network to launch a long tweet format that can reach 4,000 characters.

Down Detector has recorded more than 45,000 incident reports, most of them after 21:30 GMT.

The Information website indicated that the main shareholder and general manager of Twitter, Elon Musk, asked the platform teams to suspend all development operations until these technical problems were addressed.

The specialized site suggested that the malfunction is due to modifications that prevent user requests from being directed to the correct destination.

On the network, dozens of users indicated that they were unable to post texts, and that they had received an alert from the platform that they had exceeded the "daily limit" for the number of tweets.

However, they reported that they had success tweeting using delayed posting.

And US media noted that Twitter's help site on Wednesday added an announcement that the limit was 2,400 tweets per day.

Other users complained that they could not use TweetDeck, a platform that allows viewing a group of accounts and lists on the same screen.

The disruptions coincided with the launch of a new tweet format for subscribers of the new $8-per-month Twitter Blue service in the United States.

Subscribers to this service will be able to post tweets of up to 4,000 characters in length, while the limit for others remains 280 characters.

The help site says that retweeting these texts will be available to all users, even those who are not subscribed to Twitter Blue.