Thousands of Twitter users reported being unable to use the social media app on Saturday, prompting hashtags including “TwitterDown” and “RateLimitExeeded.”
The outage began around 8 a.m. EST Saturday morning and continued through the afternoon. According to DownDetector. As of 1 pm, there have been over 7,000 reports of outages related to the website.
Some users have flagged issues with not being able to retrieve tweets or an error message saying “Sorry, you’ve been limited. Please wait a few moments and try again.”
Elon Musk, who took over the platform in 2022, tweeted at 1pm about post reading limits to “address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation,” with the following limits being temporarily applied: Verified accounts can only read 6000 posts. Per day, unverified accounts post 600 posts per day and new unverified accounts post 300 per day.
Later in the afternoon, he tweeted that “rate limits will be increasing soon” and raised the daily limits to 8,000 posts for verified accounts, 800 for unverified accounts and 400 for new unverified accounts. By evening, he said he had increased the limits to “10k, 1k & 0.5k now”.
Others tweeted directly at Musk, “Hey Elon, my Twitter isn’t working” and “Limited reading tweets?”
Twitter users faced widespread service disruptions in March, one of the largest outages since Musk took office. More than 8,000 users reported glitches.
