Elon Musk has commented on an apparent Twitter outage impacting users Saturday. There were already thousands of outage reports by 1 p.m. ET on DownDetector.
Users who try to use the social media site’s search function get an error message that reads: “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again.”
“To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: - Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day - New unverified accounts to 300/day,” Musk said in a Saturday tweet.
One Twitter user who commented on the post said “stop making twitter pay to win.”
Audacy staff previously attempted to view the company CTO’s tweets Saturday afternoon, but could not view Musk’s tweets for some time. The billionaire, who also owns Tesla, purchased Twitter late last year and recently appointed Linda Yaccarino to serve as CEO.
“It is not clear what the cause of the problems is or how long they will last. The company is yet to comment,” said the Independent of the Twitter outage prior to the Musk announcement. According to the outlet, some users have blamed Musk himself for the outage, pointing to changes to the site since he took over.
He has made some controversial changes to the popular app, including a re-haul of its verification process that requires people to pay for verified badges. Mashable reported this week that the site was blocking visitors from viewing tweets and profiles unless they were logged in.
Musk said that was “just a temporary measure,” said the report. It is unclear if it is connected to Saturday’s outage. CNBC said it was also unclear how long the outage was expected to last.