Twitter's been hit with a widespread outage, with thousands of U.S. users reporting issues with the social media site on Saturday. It's not the first time Twitter has suffered technical difficulties in recent months. This weekend marks the latest widespread outage since Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022.
Over 7,000 people reported problems accessing Twitter to Downdetector, a website that tracks whether popular websites are down, on Saturday. Users trying to access or post content on Twitter's website or mobile app say they've been met with a "rate limit exceeded" or "cannot retrieve tweets" error message. The errors seem to crop up most frequently when trying to access the "For You" page, Twitter's feed of curated content.
According to DownDetector, this outage started around 6 a.m. ET. Thousands of users have reported issues with retrieving tweets, missing timelines and followers disappearing. Even those who manage to gain access to the platform have complained about issues.
As of now, it's unclear what the cause of the problem is or when the outage will be resolved. But ever since Musk took over Twitter, the social network has been breaking down more frequently. Timeline issues keep popping up, and earlier this year, in a controversial move, Twitter put access to two-factor authentication behind the paywall of Twitter Blue, the premium tier of Twitter.
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day- New unverified accounts to 300/dayJuly 1, 2023
In response to reports of widespread outages, Musk sent out a tweet Saturday afternoon notifying users of temporary restrictions on their accounts. Verified accounts will be limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts get 600 posts per day, and new unverified accounts 300 posts per day.
Musk said the restrictions are intended to "address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation" on Twitter. He did not provide a timeline for when these limits will be lifted.
Musk later said the view limit was to encourage users to get off the internet and go touch some grass, though how much of this was sarcasm versus his actual reasoning is anyone's guess. The tweet ended with a taunt:
"The reason I set a 'View Limit' is because we are all Twitter addicts and need to go outside. I’m doing a good deed for the world here. Also, that’s another view you just used."
This is Twitter's third major outage so far in 2023. In March, a glitch resulted in the timelines of millions seemingly wiped out with no access to recent tweets. Some users were temporarily unable to log in while others were unable to load images or links attached to posts.
Similarly, in February, users found themselves unable to post on the site for about 90 minutes after receiving the following message: "You are over the daily limit for sending Tweets."
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