Why it happens

Unfortunately uploading videos to Twitter can be unreliable, even when tweeting from the official twitter.com website.

It is common for uploads to get stuck or fail to publish. This is out of Typefully's control.

We have implemented smart retry logic that mitigates this problem, but the underlying Twitter service is unreliable. Therefore, you may experience these issues if you post videos often.

Here’s how the issue can look like on twitter.com:

Video stuck at 99% processing on Twitter’s own site

And here’s how it looks when it happens through Typefully:

Same problem posting with Typefully

What you can do about it

We noticed that these problems happen with certain formats/codecs more often than others.

Try to be consistent in your export settings when you make videos for Twitter.

If one of your posts fails to publish, to fix the problem, you can consider:

• Retrying posting with Typefully can resolve the issue as Twitter's video pipeline problems are usually temporary.
• Replacing the video file. If publishing continues to fail, this is the preferred method. Certain videos may cause Twitter's video upload pipeline to crash completely, leaving it stuck at "99% processing." Re-export your video file with different settings or replace it entirely to ensure successful publishing.
• Try with a shorter or smaller video. You can compress videos with QuickTime or iMovie on Mac or using an online tool like Veed. Sometimes smaller videos create fewer problems.
• Alternatively, use a GIF instead of a video. There are free tools that create high quality GIFs from your videos — out favorite is Gifski for Mac. Of course this isn’t always ideal, but if your video is quite short, it can be a nice alternative. Since Twitter compresses videos a lot, often a GIF is actually better anyway.
• Posting directly from Twitter.com: This is a last resort, of course, but can help if your video is longer than the allowed 2:20s allowed for third-party apps like Typefully (Supported Media Formats), or if, for some other arcane reasons, the Twitter API is having issues while the main twitter.com site is working.