Similar to online games, social media websites can struggle with server-related errors. When Twitter starts getting sluggish, you might not able to perform some of its most basic tasks, like loading or sending tweets.
When that’s the case, users will often receive the “cannot retrieve tweets at this time” error, causing them to stare at a blank homepage while being unable to tweet or send private messages. More often than not, such errors will appear due to server outages on Twitter’s end. This means that users won’t have to do much to fix the error themselves and will need to wait for Twitter to roll out a fix.
If you receive the “cannot retrieve tweets at this time” error on Twitter, you should check out Down Detector first to see whether there are other users reporting the same error. In most cases, there will be a huge influx of users reporting problems on Twitter. This kind of outage usually gets fixed within an hour, meaning your tweets should start retrieving themselves before you even notice.
Users who continue to experience the “cannot retrieve tweets at this time” error even when the servers are running fine can try troubleshooting their home network by performing a router reset. Alternatively, you can also try using a different connection or call your ISP to see if they can detect any outages with your home network.
With Twitter’s servers going down, other services associated with it, like Revue and Scroll, can also become unreachable until the servers come back online.
