DAWN.COM

Today's Paper | May 20, 2024

Updated 02 Jul, 2023 12:41am

Thousands report problems using Twitter

Thousands of users across the world reported facing issues while using Twitter on Saturday night, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.

There were more than 7,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Twitter in the United States, according to the website, while over 5,000 complaints were reported from the United Kingdom.

Users in other countries, including India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Turkiye and Germany, also reported facing problems with Twitter.

Dawn.com staffers encountered a “rate limit exceeded” message on the app and the website, with no tweets appearing on their feed.

The exact cause of the problems was not immediately clear. Twitter Inc has not directly commented on the matter yet.

However, as complaints by the users surfaced today, company owner Elon Musk said in a post on the social media platform that Twitter had applied temporary reading limits to address “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.

Verified accounts are temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, Musk said, adding that the unverified accounts and new unverified accounts are limited to reading 600 posts a day and 300 posts per day, respectively.

His post, however, did not mention or refer to any user complaints from today.

Twitter has also announced that it will require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that Musk called a “temporary emergency measure.”

Previously, a Twitter outage was reported in May, with more than 3,600 incidents of people reporting issues with the social media platform according to Downdetector.

Thousands of Twitter users had reported problems accessing links from the social media platform and other websites in March as well. Downdetector had reported more than 8,000 incidents of people reporting issues at the time.

After the problem was fixed, Musk had tweeted that a small change with Twitter’s data-access tool had caused the problem. “The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite,” he had said.

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