Just two days after Twitter rolled out its new Fleet function, the platform is struggling to keep up with user demand for its latest service, leading to mixed reviews across the platform.
"We're slowing down the roll-out of Fleets to fix some performance and stability problems," Twitter Support tweeted this morning.
"If you don’t have the feature yet, you may not get it for a few more days. We love that so many people are using Fleets and want to ensure we’re providing the best experience for everyone."
Taking their cues from Snapchat and Instagram stories, Fleets are tweets that disappear after 24 hours. The new function was rolled out in select markets on Tuesday, November 17, including India, Italy, South Korea and Japan, and had been available in Brazil since March. The icon appears at the top of users' timelines on the Twitter mobile app.
“Because they disappear from view after a day, Fleets helped people feel more comfortable sharing personal and casual thoughts, opinions, and feelings,” Twitter wrote in a blog post.
Fleets, which can include text, video, photos and gifs, cannot be retweeted or liked and are not open to public replies. However, if your direct messages are open, anyone can react to your Fleet, whereas if your DMs are private, only your followers can see and react to them.
Reports from users that the update is lagging or even crashing the app have been taken as a sign of Fleet’s popularity, and the platform has said it is working on the problem.
Other users claim the function button has appeared in their app, but they are unable to use it.
The hashtag #Fleet was trending globally soon after the international rollout, and the function appears to be Twitter’s reaction to accusations they have been trailing behind their tech contemporaries when it comes to innovation.
While plenty of users were thrilled with the latest addition to the app, many were lamenting Twitter still not adding an edit button.
Elsewhere, Twitter announced this week their plans to take on audio-based social networking app, Clubhouse – which is still in private-testing phase – by checking their own audio spaces functions, which will allow for live conversations between two people or groups.
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