Twitter Faces Outage and Imposes Read Limits: Elon Musk Takes Action
#TwitterDown: Elon Musk Announces Temporary Read Limits on Twitter
Thousands of Twitter users across several countries experienced difficulties accessing the social media site on Saturday. The trending topics "#TwitterDown" and "Rate Limit Exceeded" dominated the app in the US. Reports of outages started around 8 am EST and continued to rise throughout the morning. DownDetector recorded over 7,400 outage reports by noon EST.
Users, including CNN journalists, reported issues with loading their feeds and receiving error messages such as "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again." Some users also encountered errors indicating the inability to retrieve tweets.
In response to these problems, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, tweeted that the site had implemented temporary limits to address data scraping and system manipulation. According to Musk's tweet, verified accounts are restricted to reading 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts are limited to 600. New unverified accounts have a limit of 300 posts per day.
Musk further stated that he plans to increase the limits to 8,000 tweets per day for verified users, 800 for unverified users, and 400 for new unverified accounts in the near future.
Many users expressed frustration with the connection problems, and other trending topics in the US included "Wtf twitter" and "Thanks Elon."
It is worth noting that just the day before, Twitter seemed to restrict access to its platform for non-logged-in users. Whether this change was intentional or a glitch remains unclear. The majority of reported issues on Saturday were on the website (44%), followed by problems reported on the app (39%).
This is not the first time Twitter users have faced service disruptions since Elon Musk took over. In March, one of the largest outages occurred, with over 8,000 users reporting disruptions. Musk is actively working to improve the platform's performance, including appointing a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, in an effort to regain advertisers who had previously left the platform.