Twitter Experiences Rate Limit Issues and Outages, Elon Musk Introduces New Policies
Twitter Faces Rate Limit Exceeded and #TwitterDown Issues
Overview
Twitter users in the United States experienced significant disruptions as "Rate Limit Exceeded" and "#TwitterDown" emerged as the top trending topics on the app. The former trend generated over 40,000 tweets by Saturday noon.
Outages and Reports
Reports of service outages began circulating around 8 am EST, as indicated by DownDetector. Subsequently, the number of reports skyrocketed throughout the morning. As of noon EST, DownDetector recorded more than 7,400 reports of outages across the website.
User Complaints
Numerous users, including CNN journalists, encountered difficulties such as feed loading failures and error messages displaying "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again." Other users reported errors stating the inability to retrieve tweets from the site.
Musk Implements Policy Changes to Address Issues
Musk's Response
In response to the reported problems, billionaire owner Elon Musk took to Twitter to address the situation. He mentioned that the site had imposed temporary limits "to combat excessive data scraping and system manipulation."
Account Limitations
Elon Musk specified that verified accounts were limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts had a limit of 600 posts. New unverified accounts faced a restriction of 300 posts daily.
Introduction of Twitter Blue Verification
Musk, aiming to boost revenue, introduced a blue verification check mark exclusively for users who sign up for the Twitter Blue subscription service.
Future Changes
Musk later announced that he planned to increase the limit "soon" to 8,000 tweets per day for verified users, 800 tweets for unverified accounts, and 400 tweets for new unverified accounts.
User Frustration and Additional Trending Topics
Expressions of Frustration
The connection problems experienced by users on Twitter led to widespread frustration. Other trending topics in the United States included "Wtf twitter" and "Thanks Elon."
Previous Restriction Incident
Interestingly, just yesterday, Twitter seemed to restrict access to its platform for users not logged into an account. It remains unclear whether this change was an intentional policy update or a glitch. Most of the reported issues on Saturday were website-related, accounting for 44%, followed by app-related problems at 39%.
Historical Context
Twitter users faced similar service disruptions in March, marking one of the largest outages since Elon Musk assumed control of the platform. During that incident, over 8,000 users reported encountering disruptions.
Conclusion
Elon Musk is actively working to revive the platform, which has experienced a decline in advertiser engagement. With the appointment of a new CEO, he aims to steer Twitter in a new direction.
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