'Rate limit exceeded;' Twitter down for thousands of users worldwide

Thousands of Twitter users reported that they were 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 throughout the afternoon, according to DownDetector. As of 1 p.m., there were over 7,000 outage reports regarding the website.

Some users flagged issues that included being unable to retrieve tweets, or the error message, "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again." 

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 & system manipulation," saying that the following limits had been temporarily applied: Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts per day, unverified accounts to 600 posts per day and new unverified accounts to 300 per day.

Others tweeted Musk directly, saying things like, "Hey Elon, my Twitter isn't working" and "A limit on reading tweets?"

Twitter users faced wide-ranging service disruptions in March, one of the largest outages since Musk took over. More than 8,000 users reported disruptions.