New York CNN –
Thousands of Twitter users in several countries were unable to access the social media page on Saturday or faced difficulties and delays.
“Rate Limit Exceeded” and “#TwitterDown” are the app’s two top trending topics in the US for those who use it. The former had over 40,000 tweets as of Saturday afternoon.
According to DownDetector, reports of outages began around 8 a.m. EST (EST) and skyrocketed throughout the morning. As of noon EST, DownDetector displayed more than 7,400 outage reports on the website.
Users, including CNN journalists, reported that their feeds weren’t loading and they were seeing the “Sorry, your rate is limited” error message. Please wait a moment and then try again.” Others reported errors saying the site couldn’t fetch tweets.
Hours after users began reporting the issues, billionaire Elon Musk tweeted that the site had implemented temporary restrictions “to counter the extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”
Verified accounts are only allowed to read 6,000 posts per day, he tweeted, while unverified accounts are limited to just 600. For new unverified accounts, it’s 300 posts per day.
To increase sales, Musk offers a blue verification tick to users who sign up for his Twitter Blue subscription service.
Musk later announced that he would be increasing the limit “soon” to 8,000 tweets per day for verified users, 800 for unverified accounts, and 400 for new unverified accounts.
Many expressed frustration with the connectivity issues. Other trending topics in the US were: “Wtf Twitter” and “Thank you Elon”.
Just yesterday, Twitter appeared to restrict access to its platform for anyone not logged into an account. It was not clear whether the change was an intentional policy update or a bug. Most of the issues reported on Saturday were related to the website at 44%, followed by 39% of the issues reported via the app.
CNN reached out to Twitter for comment, but the platform responded with an automated poop emoji.
Twitter users faced a similarly sweeping service disruption in March, one of the biggest outages since Elon Musk took power. More than 8,000 users reported disruptions.
Musk is trying to turn the tide on the platform, which has been facing advertiser churn, by hiring a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino.