Thousands of Twitter users from various countries encountered difficulties accessing the popular social media platform on Saturday as outages and delays plagued the site.
The phrases "Rate Limit Exceeded" and "#TwitterDown" quickly became the top trending topics on the app in the US, garnering over 40,000 tweets by Saturday noon. Reports of the outages first emerged around 8 am EST, according to DownDetector, and the number of complaints surged through the morning, with more than 7,400 outage reports registered on the website as of noon EST.
Frustration spread among users, including CNN journalists, who experienced issues loading their feeds and were met with error messages stating, "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again." Others reported receiving errors indicating that the site could not retrieve tweets.
Hours after users began reporting the problems, Twitter's billionaire owner, Elon Musk, addressed the issue with a series of tweets. He stated that the platform had implemented temporary limits to combat "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation." According to Musk, verified accounts were restricted to reading 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts. New unverified accounts were allowed only 300 posts a day.
Musk also revealed that users who sign up for the Twitter Blue subscription service would receive a blue verification checkmark, offering additional posting privileges and potentially boosting the platform's revenue. He further announced that he would increase the posting limit "soon," allowing verified users to post up to 8,000 tweets a day, unverified users to post 800, and new unverified accounts to post 400.
The Twitter outage sparked an array of trending topics in the US, including "Wtf twitter" and "Thanks Elon," as users expressed their frustration with the connection problems. Just the day before, Twitter appeared to have restricted access to its platform for non-logged-in users, although it was unclear if this change was intentional or a glitch. The majority of reported issues on Saturday were on the website, accounting for 44% of the complaints, while 39% of the problems were reported on the app.
In March, Twitter experienced a similar extensive service disruption, one of the largest since Elon Musk assumed ownership, with more than 8,000 users reporting disruptions during that incident.
Musk is actively working to revitalize the platform, which faced an advertiser exodus, by bringing in a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino. The latest Twitter outage underscores the challenges faced by the social media giant and the efforts to stabilize and improve its service.
CNN reached out to Twitter for comment, but the platform's response was an automated poop emoji, leaving users eager for more concrete explanations.