In a global incident that caused frustration and confusion, numerous Twitter users found themselves unable to access the social media platform or encountered delays in loading content on Saturday.

The situation sparked a wave of concern and prompted the trending topics “Rate Limit Exceeded” and “#TwitterDown” on the app in the US. The former garnered over 40,000 tweets by Saturday noon.

Reports of outages began surfacing around 8 am EST, according to DownDetector, and escalated throughout the morning. By noon EST, DownDetector had recorded more than 7,400 outage reports across the website.

Users raised concerns about their feeds not loading and receiving error messages such as “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again.” Others encountered errors indicating the inability to retrieve tweets.

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, addressed the situation hours later through a tweet. He revealed that the platform had implemented temporary limits “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”

Musk explained that verified accounts were restricted to reading 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts. Newly created unverified accounts faced a limit of 300 posts per day.

Interestingly, Musk recently introduced a blue verification check mark exclusively for users who subscribe to Twitter Blue, a paid service aimed at increasing revenue.

Twitter users vented their frustration over the connection issues, leading to additional trending topics such as “Wtf twitter” and “Thanks Elon.”

Notably, just one day prior, Twitter seemed to be restricting access to its platform for users not logged into an account. Whether this change was an intentional policy update or a glitch remains unclear. The majority of the reported problems on Saturday occurred on the website, accounting for 44%, followed by 39% of reported issues on the app.

This isn’t the first time Twitter has experienced widespread disruptions since Elon Musk assumed ownership. In March, a similar outage affected a significant number of users, with over 8,000 reports of disruptions recorded.

As part of his efforts to revitalize the platform, Musk appointed Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO in a bid to address the advertiser exodus Twitter has faced.

With users eagerly awaiting a resolution to the outage, the incident underscores the challenges faced by one of the world’s most influential social media platforms and the ongoing efforts to improve its stability and user experience.