On Saturday, Twitter users from various countries experienced difficulties accessing the social media platform. Many encountered delays or were unable to view the site altogether. The issue gained attention with hashtags like “Rate Limit Exceeded” and “#TwitterDown” trending in the US. By Saturday noon, the former hashtag had accumulated over 40,000 tweets.
Reports of outages started around 8 am EST and increased throughout the morning. DownDetector, a service that tracks website outages, recorded over 7,400 reports of issues with the Twitter website by noon EST.
Users, journalists, reported problems with their Twitter feeds not loading. They encountered error messages such as “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again” or were unable to retrieve tweets.
The owner of Twitter of Elon Musk, addressed the situation hours later. He tweeted that temporary reach limits had been implemented to combat excessive data scraping and system manipulation. According to the Elon Musk, verified accounts were restricted to viewing 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts. New unverified accounts had a limit of 300 posts per day.
Musk also mentioned that Twitter Blue subscribers, who signed up for the platform’s subscription service, would receive a blue verification check mark. This move aimed to generate revenue for the platform. Later, he announced plans to increase the limits to 8,000 tweets per day for verified users, 800 tweets per day for unverified users, and 400 tweets per day for new unverified accounts.
Many Twitter users expressed their frustration with the connection issues, resulting in hashtags like “Wtf twitter” and “Thanks Elon” trending in the US.
Interestingly, the day before the outage, Twitter appeared to restrict access to its platform for users who were not logged in. It was unclear whether this change was intentional or a glitch. Most of the people faced problems on Saturday were related to the website 44%, followed by issues with the app 39%.
reached out to Twitter for comment, but the platform’s response was an automated poop emoji. This incident marks one of the significant service disruptions on Twitter since Elon Musk took over, with over 8,000 users reporting disruptions during a similar outage in March.
