Over the weekend, Twitter experienced widespread accessibility issues, leaving thousands of users in various countries unable to access or navigate the popular social media platform. The hashtags “#TwitterDown” and “Rate Limit Exceeded” quickly gained traction among frustrated users in the United States, with the former amassing over 40,000 tweets by Saturday noon.
According to DownDetector, reports of outages started surfacing at approximately 8 am EST and steadily increased throughout the morning. As of noon EST, the website had accumulated over 7,400 outage reports from users across the globe.
Individuals, discovered that their Twitter feeds failed to load, accompanied by an error message displaying “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments, then try again.” Others encountered issues where tweets could not be retrieved from the site.
Musk changes policy
In response to these ongoing problems, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who owns the platform, took to Twitter to address the situation. He announced that temporary limits had been implemented in an effort to combat the escalating levels of data scraping and system manipulation that Twitter was facing.
According to Musk’s tweet, verified accounts would now be restricted to reading 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts would be limited to 600 posts. New unverified accounts would have an even lower daily limit of 300 posts. This policy change coincided with Musk’s recent introduction of a blue verification check mark for users who subscribed to the Twitter Blue service, aimed at generating additional revenue.
Later on, Musk followed up with another tweet, indicating his intention to increase the daily limits in the near future. Verified users would soon be able to read up to 8,000 tweets per day, while unverified accounts would have a limit of 800, and new unverified accounts would be able to access 400 posts daily.
Twitter users expressed their frustrations with the connection issues, leading to other hashtags such as “Wtf twitter” and “Thanks Elon” trending in the United States.
Interestingly, just the day before the widespread outage, Twitter seemed to restrict access to its platform for users who were not logged into an account. It remained unclear whether this change was a deliberate policy update or simply a glitch. The majority of reported issues on Saturday originated from the website, accounting for 44% of the problems, followed by 39% reported on the mobile app.
According to report reached out to Twitter for comment regarding the situation, but the platform responded with an automated poop emoji, leaving users and media outlets without further clarification.
This recent Twitter outage echoes a similar incident in March, which marked one of the most substantial disruptions since Elon Musk assumed ownership of the company. During that episode, over 8,000 users reported experiencing service disruptions.