Is Twitter Dying due to Exceeding Rate Limits?

Twitter experiences global outage, prompting frustration and concern among users. Elon Musk addresses the situation, citing temporary limits due to data scraping.

On Saturday, a global incident left Twitter users frustrated and confused as they encountered difficulties accessing the social media platform or experienced delays in loading content. This sparked concern and led to trending topics like "Rate Limit Exceeded" and "#TwitterDown" in the US, with the former generating over 40,000 tweets by noon.

Reports of outages began to emerge around 8 am EST, as reported by DownDetector, and continued to escalate throughout the morning. By noon EST, DownDetector had received more than 7,400 outage reports from users across the website.

Users expressed concerns about their feeds not loading and receiving error messages such as "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again." Some even encountered errors indicating that they were unable to retrieve tweets.

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, addressed the situation hours later through a tweet. He explained that the platform had implemented temporary limits "to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation." Verified accounts were restricted to reading 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts. Newly created unverified accounts faced a limit of 300 posts per day.

Interestingly, Musk recently introduced a blue verification check mark exclusively for users subscribed to Twitter Blue, a paid service aimed at boosting revenue.

Twitter users expressed their frustration over the connection issues, leading to additional trending topics such as "Wtf twitter" and "Thanks Elon."

It's worth noting that just one day before the incident, Twitter seemed to restrict access to its platform for users not logged into an account. Whether this change was an intentional policy update or a glitch remains unclear. The majority of reported problems on Saturday occurred on the website, accounting for 44%, followed by 39% of reported issues on the app.

This isn't the first time Twitter has experienced widespread disruptions since Elon Musk took ownership. In March, a similar outage affected a significant number of users, with over 8,000 reports of disruptions recorded.

As part of his efforts to revitalize the platform, Musk appointed Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO to address the advertiser exodus Twitter has been facing.

With users eagerly awaiting a resolution to the outage, this incident highlights the challenges faced by one of the world's most influential social media platforms and the ongoing efforts to enhance its stability and user experience.