Twitter wasn’t working for thousands of users on Saturday.
Jeff Chiu/AP
Jeff Chiu/AP
Thousands of Twitter users reported problems accessing the site on Saturday.
The issue appeared to affect users on both the social media app and website.
Many people who tried to view, search, refresh and post content on the platform were met with error messages that read, “Rate limit exceeded” or “Cannot retrieve tweets.”
“Please wait a few moments then try again,” the prompts read.
The issue was intermittent; many people were at some point able to post about their inability to access the site.
More than 7,400 people reported a problem accessing Twitter as of about 11 a.m. ET, according the website Downdetector. That number fell by about 1,000 reports by early afternoon.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced temporary limits on the number of posts people can view.
Twitter/Screenshot by NPR
Twitter/Screenshot by NPR
Twitter CEO Elon Musk addressed the issue Saturday morning. He said viewing limits would be temporarily imposed on tweets to address “extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation.”
“Verified” accounts will soon be limited to reading 8,000 posts per day and unverified accounts limited to 800 tweets per day, Musk said. The limit on new, unverified accounts is 400 per day.
The restrictions follow Twitter’s announcement that it would require users to sign up for or log into an existing account on the site to be able to view tweets. He called the move a “temporary emergency measure,” adding that several hundred organizations were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively,” which he said was affecting user experience.
The recent set of limitations, however, have struck many users as a ploy to get users to pay more money in order to access a better experience on Twitter with a “verified” account, which costs $8 per month.
In an emailed response to NPR’s inquiry, Twitter responded with its standard poop emoji.
It’s the latest widespread outage since Musk took over the social media site late last year.
Previous outages coincided with reports of mass layoffs at Twitter, which Musk said were financially necessary for the company. Since the Space X and Tesla CEO acquired the company in October, the site’s ad revenue has taken a steep dive.