On Saturday, Twitter encountered a widespread outage that left thousands of users unable to access the platform. With hashtags like “TwitterDown” and “RateLimitExceeded” trending, frustrated individuals voiced their concerns. The disruption began at 8 a.m. EST and lasted throughout the afternoon, leading to over 7,000 outage reports on DownDetector.
During the outage, users faced various issues, including the inability to retrieve tweets and the appearance of an error message stating, “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again.”
Elon Musk, who took over the platform in 2022, addressed the situation in a tweet around 1 p.m. He explained that temporary limitations had been implemented to counteract excessive data scraping and system manipulation. Verified accounts could read up to 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts per day. New unverified accounts had a reading limit of 300 posts per day.
Many users reached out to Musk directly, expressing their frustration and seeking answers regarding the limitations on reading tweets.
This outage is another notable incident following the disruptions experienced by Twitter users in March, which were among the most significant since Musk’s involvement. Over 8,000 users reported service disruptions during that period.
