Twitter outages frustrate users, prompting answers from Elon Musk on post reading limits

Thousands of Twitter users reported being unable to use the social media app on Saturday, prompting hashtags that included “TwitterDown” and “RateLimitExceeded.”

The outage began Saturday morning around 8 a.m. EST and continued into the afternoon, according to DownDetector. As of 1 p.m., there were over 7,000 downtime reports regarding the website.

Some users flagged issues that included not being able to retrieve tweets, or the error message “Sorry, you’re price-limited. Please wait and try again.”[ads1];

Elon Musk, who took over the platform in 2022, tweeted around 1 p.m. about post reading limits “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation,” saying the following limits were temporarily applied: Verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts at 600 posts per day and new unverified accounts at 300 per day.

Later in the afternoon, he tweeted that “rate limits will increase soon” and increased the daily limits to 8,000 posts for verified accounts, 800 for unverified accounts and 400 for new unverified accounts. In the evening he said he had increased the limits “now to 10k, 1k and 0.5k.”

Others directly tweeted Musk, saying things like “Hey Elon, my Twitter isn’t working” and “A limit to reading tweets?”

Twitter users faced widespread service disruptions in March, one of the biggest outages since Musk took over. More than 8,000 users reported disruptions.