Twitter users around the world experienced frustration and difficulties on Saturday as the social media platform encountered widespread outages. “Rate Limit Exceeded” and “#TwitterDown” quickly became the top trending topics on the app in the US, with thousands of users voicing their concerns. Reports of outages started surfacing at around 8 am EST and continued to rise throughout the morning, with over 7,400 outage reports on DownDetector by noon EST.
Many users, including CNN journalists, complained that their feeds were not loading and encountered error messages such as “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again” or an inability to retrieve tweets from the site.
In response to the growing issues, billionaire owner Elon Musk took to Twitter to address the situation. Musk tweeted that temporary limits had been implemented to combat “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.” Verified accounts would be restricted to reading 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts were limited to 600. New unverified accounts faced a further reduction, allowing only 300 posts per day. As an incentive to sign up for the Twitter Blue subscription service, Musk offered a blue verification checkmark, granting users increased limits.
However, shortly after his initial announcement, Musk declared that the limits would soon be increased. Verified users would have their daily read limit raised to 8,000 tweets, unverified users to 800, and new unverified accounts to 400.
The Twitter community expressed frustration with the connection problems, resulting in additional trending topics such as “Wtf twitter” and “Thanks Elon.”
Interestingly, the day before the widespread outages, Twitter appeared to restrict access to its platform for users who were not logged into an account. It remains unclear whether this change was intentional or a glitch. The majority of reported issues on Saturday were related to the website, accounting for 44% of problems, while 39% were reported on the app.
BuzzFeed News reached out to Twitter for comment, but the platform responded with an automated poop emoji, leaving users and experts puzzled by the lack of a proper response.
This is not the first time Twitter has faced significant service disruptions since Elon Musk took over. In March, the platform experienced one of its largest outages, affecting over 8,000 users. Musk’s efforts to revitalize the platform include the recent appointment of Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO, as Twitter works to regain the trust of advertisers and improve its overall user experience.
