Thousands of users across the world have been unable to access Twitter or faced delays beginning on Saturday. By the afternoon, “Rate Limit Exceeded” and “#TwitterDown” were trending in the US.

Outages began at 8:00 am EST, according to DownDetector, and peaked around 6:00 pm, when over 7,400 outages were reported. As of 1:00 pm, July 2, reports are down compared to their levels on Saturday. However, the outages continue, with reported incidents ranging from around 2,000 at midnight to around 300 to 500 during the day.

Users have experienced issues with their Twitter feeds not loading and an error message reading, “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again.” The billionaire owner of Twitter Elon Musk tweeted that temporary limits were set to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.”

“We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users,” Musk explained in a tweet on Friday.

Verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, unverified accounts to 600 posts a day, and new unverified accounts to 300 posts a day. Musk later posted that he would eventually increase the limit to 8,000 tweets a day for verified users, 800 for unverified users, and 400 for new unverified users.

On Friday, it appeared that Twitter restricted access to its site for visitors not logged into an account. Users have expressed exasperation about Twitter’s outages, posting GIFs of people typing arbitrarily on their computer keyboards with captions like “Elon Musk playing with twitter be like.”

“ARE WE BACK” was one of the top trending topics in the US as of 1:00 pm on Sunday, with some users reporting an end to the outages and others complaining about still not being able to access tweets.

Musk joked that, due to the outages, users would be forced to “awake from a deep trance,” take a break from their phones and spend time with their friends and family.

Twitter users faced similar outages in March, with more than 8,000 users reporting disruptions. Musk laid off half of Twitter’s employees just a week after he acquired the platform in October 2022 for USD 44 billion. Musk fired more than 80 percent of Twitter’s workforce since he took over.

Engineers raised concerns about whether the platform would be able to remain usable and bug-free.

Twitter discontinued free access to its API, which allowed developers access to millions of tweets, on Feb. 9, 2023. The discontinuation came as Twitter abruptly changed its rules to ban third parties from accessing data.

Following the large-scale departure of advertisers, Twitter onboarded a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino. Twitter is forecast to lose 4 percent of users by 2023 and an additional five percent by 2024.

Adam Leon Smith from BCS, an institute in the UK for IT professionals, said the move was “very odd.” Smith said that limiting users’ time on Twitter might decrease the company’s advertising revenue.