New York
CNN
,
Thousands of Twitter users in several countries were unable to access the social media site on Saturday, or faced difficulties and delays.
“Rate limit reached” and “#TwitterDown” are two of the top trending topics on the app in the US, for people who use it. The former had more than 40,000 tweets as of Saturday afternoon.
According to DownDetector, reports of outages began around 8 a.m. EST and continued to increase through the morning. until noon EST, Downdetector Has shown Over 7,400 outage reports on website.
Users, including CNN reporters, reported that their feed was not loading and received an error message that read, “Sorry, your rate is limited. Please wait a few moments and then try again.” Others reported errors, saying the site could not retrieve the tweets.
Hours after users began reporting problems, billionaire owner Elon Musk tweeted that the site had implemented temporary limits “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation”.
He tweeted, Verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts are limited to only 600. New unverified accounts are limited to reading 300 posts a day.
Musk began offering blue verification check marks to users who signed up for his Twitter Blue subscription service in order to increase revenue.
Later, Musk posted that he would “soon” increase the limit to 8,000 tweets for verified users, 800 for unverified, and 400 for new unverified accounts.
Many expressed their frustration over the connection problems. Other trending topics in the US include: “WTF Twitter” and “Thanks Alon.”
Just yesterday, it appeared that Twitter is restricting access to its platform for anyone who hasn’t logged into an account. It was not clear whether this change was an intentional policy update or a glitch. Most of the problems reported on Saturday were on the website at 44%, followed by the app at 39%.
CNN contacted Twitter for comment, but the platform responded with an automated poop emoji.
Twitter users faced similar widespread service disruptions in March, one of the biggest outages since Elon Musk took office. More than 8,000 users reported disruption in that incident.
Musk is trying to turn around the platform, which had suffered an exodus of advertisers, by bringing in a new CEO, Linda Yacarino.