TwitterDown: Elon Musk Announces Temporary Read Limits on Twitter
Twitter users in multiple countries encountered difficulties accessing the social media platform on Saturday, leading to widespread outages and delays. The hashtags “#TwitterDown” and “Rate Limit Exceeded” quickly became top trending topics in the US, with over 40,000 tweets about the issue by Saturday noon.
Reports of the outages started surfacing around 8 am EST, according to DownDetector, and continued to increase throughout the morning. As of noon EST, DownDetector had received over 7,400 outage reports for the website.
Users, including CNN journalists, noticed that their Twitter feeds weren’t loading and encountered error messages such as “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again.” Others reported errors related to tweet retrieval.
In response to the growing concerns, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, tweeted that the site had implemented temporary limits to address excessive data scraping and system manipulation.
He explained that verified accounts could read up to 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 announced that he would be increasing these limits “soon” to 8,000 tweets per day for verified users, 800 for unverified users, and 400 for new unverified accounts. This news prompted a mix of frustration and appreciation from users, with hashtags like “Wtf twitter” and “Thanks Elon” gaining popularity in the US.
Interestingly, just the day before, Twitter seemed to restrict access to its platform for users not logged into an account. It remained unclear whether this change was an intentional policy update or a glitch. Most of the reported problems on Saturday occurred on the website (44%), followed by 39% of issues reported on the app.
This isn’t the first time Twitter has experienced widespread disruptions. In March, a similar incident occurred, affecting a large number of users.
Elon Musk has been working to revitalize the platform, which faced a decline in advertiser interest, with the appointment of new CEO Linda Yaccarino.
