How many characters were originally allowed in a tweet?

Twitter expanded the character limit from 140 to 280 characters for most languages on November 7, 2017. This change was implemented to allow users to express themselves more freely and fully in their tweets, especially in languages where cramming thoughts into 140 characters was more challenging. However, certain languages that use characters that can convey more information, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, remained at the 140-character limit.