Twitter Experiences Widespread Outage, Sparking Concerns Over Reading Limits and Data Scraping

 Twitter Experiences Widespread Outage, Sparking Concerns Over Reading Limits and Data Scraping

Twitter Experiences Widespread Outage

Numerous Twitter users experienced difficulties accessing the social media platform on Saturday, leading to the trending hashtags "TwitterDown" and "RateLimitExceeded."

The disruption began on Saturday morning at approximately 8 a.m. EST and persisted throughout the afternoon, as reported by DownDetector. By 1 p.m., there were over 7,000 reports of the outage.

Users encountered various issues, such as the inability to retrieve tweets or receiving the error message, "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again."

Elon Musk, who assumed control of the San Francisco-based platform in 2022, posted a tweet at around 1 p.m. regarding post reading limitations. He mentioned implementing these limits temporarily to counteract excessive data scraping and system manipulation. The imposed limits were as follows: verified accounts were restricted to reading 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts to 600 posts per day, and new unverified accounts to 300 per day.

Several users directly tweeted Elon Musk, expressing concerns like "Hey Elon, my Twitter isn't working" and "Why is there a limit on reading tweets?"

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve implemented the following temporary limits:

- Verified accounts can read up to 6,000 posts per day.

- Unverified accounts can read up to 600 posts per day.

- New unverified accounts can read up to 300 posts per day.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

In March, Twitter users faced widespread service disruptions, marking one of the largest outages since Musk assumed leadership, with over 8,000 users reporting disruptions.