Users Left Scrambling As Twitter Hit By A Global Outage

Social media platform Twitter has been hit by a massive global outage as many users, including in India, have been unable to access tweets.

Many users took to the platform to complain that the social media platform was not completely accessible and showed an error message, ‘Cannot retrieve tweets at this time. Please try again later’, while viewing their posts. For many others, the platform showed the message ‘Rate limit exceeded’.

Simply put, the ‘rate limit exceeded’ warning refers to a platform exceeding the maximum threshold for the number of tweets or posts and related activities on the particular social media platform.

As per DownDetector, reports began to trickle down about the outage around 5:05 PM. From seven reports flagging the downtime around the same time, the number of complaints rose to 284 around 6:35 PM. 

“User reports indicate possible problems at Twitter,” said DownDetector in a message on its website. 

“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, uverified accounts to 600 posts/day and new unverified accounts to 300/day,” said Twitter boss Elon Musk.

Meanwhile, a report attributed the outage to a bug associated with recent restrictions on user activity undertaken by the site.

The outage comes close on the heels of Twitter making a slew of changes to the platform in the recent past. Recently, it imposed limited access for users that do not have an account on the platform.

Recently, the company also unveiled paid API subscription plans, which have largely been marred by frequent breakdown issues.

Many also reported broken previews while integrating Twitter APIs on other platforms such as Discord and Slack, adding that the new product is infested with bugs and locked customer support. 

Post the acquisition by Elon Musk, the company also undertook mass layoffs, which saw the exit of many key tech personnel. The company also left Google Cloud server payments unpaid for months, before finally resuming it. 

Meanwhile, a meme fest broke out on the social media platform due to the outage, with many users taking potshots at Twitter. 

However, this is not the first time that a major user-facing internet company has witnessed an outage this year. In April, many WhatsApp users in the country also faced an outage and were unable to download videos on the app. 

Afterwards, access to investech platform Zerodha was also disrupted as many users were unable to complete their orders due to a glitch. Prior to that in March, streaming giant Netflix also suffered an outage.