Barely an hour after Twitter’s owner and former CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the service was temporarily implementing restrictions on the number of tweets users could view, a small disruption to the social-media giant’s service mushroomed into a more massive outage that lasted for hours.
On Saturday morning, users in several countries began reporting glitches on desktop and mobile, and the tech-tracking website DownDetector shows a huge spike in reports.
At 10 a.m. Pacific Time, Musk tweeted that as a way of addressing “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation,” Twitter would limit verified accounts to viewing 6,000 posts per day. Unverified accounts would be limited to 600, and new unverified accounts to only 300.
It was unclear to many Twitter uses whether Musk’s reference to “posts” referred to tweet threads, or if replies to tweets would also count toward that cap, which a few minutes of idle scrolling could exceed. Some observers noted that trolls, bots or other users with malign intentions could theoretically swarm an account, quickly pushing someone over the rate cap for the day.
Further, it was unclear which forms of data scraping Musk was referring to, as he has already taken steps to limit third-party access to Twitter’s data. In early June, Musk stepped down as the CEO of X Corp., Twitter’s parent company, and handed control to former television executive Linda Yaccarino.
Saturday’s disruption appears to be widespread, similar to a worldwide outage in December 2022 that was resolved within a few hours. While tweets were unable to load, users could still see the hashtag #TwitterDown trending alongside “Rate Limit Exceeded.”