Thousands of Twitter users across several countries were unable to access the social media site, or faced difficulty and delays, Saturday.
“Rate Limit Exceeded” and “#TwitterDown” are the two top trending topics on the app in the US, for those who have use of it. The former had over 40,000 tweets as of Saturday noon.
Reports of outages began around 8 am EST, according to DownDetector, and shot up through the morning. As of noon EST, DownDetector showed more than 7,400 outage reports across the website.
Users, including CNN journalists, flagged that their feeds weren’t loading and that they were met with an error message saying, “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again.” Others reported errors saying the site cannot retrieve tweets.
Musk changes policy
Hours after users began reporting the problems, billionaire owner Elon Musk tweeted that the site had applied temporary limits “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”
Verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, he tweeted, while unverified accounts are limited to just 600. New unverified accounts are at 300 posts a day.
Musk began offering a blue verification check mark for users who sign up for its Twitter Blue subscription service to grow revenue.
Later, Musk posted he will increase the limit “soon” to 8,000 tweets a day for verified users, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified accounts.
Many expressed their frustration ith the connection problems. Other trending topics in the US included: “Wtf twitter” and “Thanks Elon.”
Just yesterday, Twitter appeared to be restricting access to its platform for anyone not logged into an account. It was not clear whether the change was an intentional policy update or a glitch. Most of the reported problems Saturday were on the website, at 44%, followed by 39% of problems reported on the app.
CNN has reached out to Twitter for comment, but the platform responded with an automated poop emoji.
Twitter users faced similar wide-ranging service disruptions in March, one of the largest outages since Elon Musk took over. More than 8,000 users reported disruptions in that instance.
Musk is trying to turn around the platform, which faced an exodus of advertisers, with the onboarding of a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino.
CNN’s Clare Duffy contributed to this report.
