#Thousands of Twitter Users Face Outages and Delays: What Happened and How Elon Musk Responded
Twitter, one of the world's most influential social media platforms, encountered widespread outages and disruptions on Saturday, leaving thousands of users across several countries unable to access the site or facing difficulties and delays. Reports of the outages started surfacing around 8 am EST and escalated throughout the morning, causing frustration among users. The trending topics "#TwitterDown" and "Rate Limit Exceeded" quickly emerged on the app, garnering thousands of tweets.
##The Outages and User Reports
According to DownDetector, a platform that monitors online service disruptions, over 7,400 outage reports were recorded for Twitter by noon EST. Users, including CNN journalists, expressed their concerns as their feeds failed to load, encountering error messages such as "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again" or being unable to retrieve tweets.
##Elon Musk Intervenes
As the complaints flooded in, Twitter's owner and billionaire entrepreneur, Elon Musk, took to Twitter himself to address the situation. Musk revealed that temporary limits had been imposed on the platform to counteract excessive data scraping and system manipulation. He explained that verified accounts were restricted to reading 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts were limited to just 600. New unverified accounts faced even more stringent limitations, with a cap of 300 posts per day.
##Twitter Blue and Changes Ahead
In an attempt to boost revenue, Elon Musk introduced a blue verification checkmark for users who subscribed to Twitter Blue, the platform's premium subscription service. This move aimed to provide additional incentives for users to sign up for the subscription, thereby increasing Twitter's overall revenue. Additionally, Musk announced plans to revise the limitations, allowing verified users to tweet up to 8,000 times a day, unverified users to post 800 times, and new unverified accounts to share 400 posts daily.
##Frustration and Additional Trends
Many Twitter users expressed their frustration with the connection problems and voiced their concerns on the platform. Alongside the main trending topics, "#TwitterDown" and "Rate Limit Exceeded," other hashtags like "Wtf twitter" and "Thanks Elon" gained popularity as users shared their opinions and experiences. These trends highlighted the impact of the outages and users' mixed reactions to the limitations imposed by Elon Musk.
##Twitter's Recent Challenges
The recent outages and disruptions on Twitter are not isolated incidents. The platform previously restricted access for users not logged into an account, which led to speculations about intentional policy updates or technical glitches. The majority of the reported problems on Saturday occurred on the website, accounting for 44% of the issues, followed by 39% on the app.
In March, during one of the largest outages since Elon Musk assumed control of Twitter, more than 8,000 users reported service disruptions. This event, coupled with a significant loss of advertisers, prompted Musk's strategic decision to appoint a new CEO, Linda Yacc
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