Thousands of Twitter users have reported problems with the social media platform this afternoon.
More than 5,000 people have complained of issues on the Down Detector site, including the inability to retrieve tweets, missing timelines and followers disappearing.
It is not clear what the cause of the problems is or how long they will last. Elon Musk said on Saturday afternoon that temporary reading limits would be applied for users “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation”.
Verified accounts would be limited to reading 6000 posts per day, unverified accounts would be limited to 600 posts per day and new unverified accounts to 300 per day. He later posted that this will be increased soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified.
Reports of the outage began on Down Detector at 12:19pm and have continued throughout the day. Three hours later, the same issues persist and users were getting frustrated.
Some wrote on the outage monitoring site: “I can’t believe how long this has been going on for now,” and “This is just getting beyond a joke now.”
Almost half of the issues reported are on the app, a third on the website and the rest on Twitter’s feed.
For those who are still able to use Twitter, #TwitterDown and #RateLimitExceeded are the top two trending hashtags.
Users have reported receiving the message ‘rate-limit exceeded’ on their For You page, a page usually consisting of non-stop personal, curated content.
A user who received this message said: “Dear Twitter, I am not rate limited as there is no rate limit-sort this out NOW!”
Many users are looking to Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, for answers.
One said: “It is not clear what the cause of the problems is or how long they will last.” It would help in the name of transparency if you answered this question Elon?”
Another social media user wrote: “I joined Twitter in 2009, and I’ve had more problems since Elon took over than the whole time before that. Insanity.”
Even those who have access to the platform have complained about issues.
And, as usual with social media outages, the memes are already coming thick and fast.
The latest issues come after a major outage on the site in March, soon after the company’s most recent round of layoffs.
Visitors to the site saw what appeared to be a welcome page, as if they did not follow anyone on the site. It encouraged them to click through and find their first people to follow.
“Welcome to Twitter!” the message read. “This is the best place to see what’s happening in your world. Find some people and topics to follow now.”
A similar message appeared on the app version of Twitter, with a button reading “Let’s go” that took users to a list of suggested users.
But there was no way to get around that initial message, leaving users unable to see the feed or any posts from the people they do actually already follow.
