New York () — Thousands of Twitter users in various countries were unable to access the social networking site or faced difficulties and delays in doing so on Saturday.
“Rate Limit Exceeded” and “#TwitterDown” —which translates into Spanish as “cuota limit exceeded” and “#CaídaDeTwitter”— are the two trending topics in the application in the United States, for those who use the social network. The first had more than 40,000 tweets until noon this Saturday.
Reports of power outages in various countries began around 8 am EST, according to DownDetector, and fired during the course of the morning. As of noon EST, DownDetector displayed more than 7,400 outage reports on the website.
Users, including journalists, reported that their feeds were not loading and that they received an error message that read: “Sorry, your rate is limited. Wait a few moments and try again.” Others reported errors saying the site couldn’t retrieve the tweets.
Musk Change Policy
Hours after users began reporting the problems, the billionaire owner Elon Musk tweeted that the site had enforced time limits “to address extreme levels of data mining and system manipulation.”
Verified accounts will be able to read 6,000 posts per day, he tweeted, while unverified accounts are limited to just 600. New unverified accounts have 300 posts per day.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 24: Tesla CEO Elon Musk leaves the Phillip Burton Federal Building on January 24, 2023 in San Francisco, California.
Musk began offering a blue check mark for users who sign up for his Twitter Blue subscription service, with the goal of increasing revenue.
Many expressed frustration with connection issues. Other trending topics in the United States included: “Wtf twitter” and “Thank you Elon.”
Just yesterday, Twitter appeared to be restricting access to its platform for anyone not logged into an account. It was unclear if the change was an intentional policy update or a bug. The majority of issues reported this Saturday were on the website, at 44%, followed by 39% of issues reported on the app.
reached out to Twitter for comment, but the platform responded with an automated poop emoji.
Twitter users faced similar wide-ranging service outages in March, one of the biggest outages since Elon Musk took over the company. More than 8,000 users reported outages in that case.
Musk is trying to turn around a platform that has faced an exodus of advertisers, with the addition of a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino.
‘s Clare Duffy contributed to this report.
