Twitter suspends retweet service

Twitter has been forced to pull its retweet service after it was hit by technical problems – just days after rolling out the service to a limited number of accounts.

Late yesterday, the firm posted a status announcement on its pages saying, "We’ve been contending with an elevated number of errors since late last night. We’ve ruled out a number of causes of this problem but are still working to reduce the number of errors on the site."

Since then it has posted the following update: "We’re continuing to make changes and are seeing errors return to more acceptable levels."

Designed to remove the burden of manually retweeting an article, automatic retweets were only announced at the start of November.

At that time, the firm said in a blog post, "We've just activated a feature called retweet on a very small percentage of accounts in order to see how it works in the wild."

"If things look good, we'll proceed with releasing the feature in stages eventually arriving at 100 per cent," the blog post continued.