New York CNN —
Thousands of Twitter users across several countries were unable to access the social media site, or faced duifficulty and delays, Saturday.
“Rate Limit Exceeded” and “#TwitterDown” are the two top trending topics on the app in the US, for those who have use of it. The former had over 40,000 tweets as of Saturday noon.
Reports of outages began around 8 am EST, according to DownDetector, and shot up through the morning. As of noon EST, DownDetector showed more than 7,400 outage reports across the website.
Users, including CNN journalists, flagged that their feeds weren’t loading and that they were met with an error message saying, “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again.” Others reported errors saying the site cannot retrieve tweets.
Many expressed their frustration. Other trending topics in the US included: “Wtf twitter” and “Thanks Elon.” But Musk cannot be blamed, at least not for creating the problem.
Rate limited messages have been sent for years intermittently to some users, according to the site’s own Twitter blog as far back as 2008. But that limit now is 2,400 tweets, which users were not exceeding.
Most of the reported problems Saturday were on the website, at 44%, followed by 39% of problems reported on the app.
There were scattered claims that blue-check users, who pay for additional verification, were not affected but these could not be confirmed.
CNN has reached out to Twitter for comment, but the platform responded with an automated poop emoji.
Twitter users faced wide-ranging service disruptions in March, one of the largest outages since Elon Musk took over. More than 8,000 users reported disruptions in that instance.
Musk is trying to turn around the platform, which faced an exodus of advertisers, with the onboarding of a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino. He is also offering a blue verification checkmark for users who sign up for its Twitter Blue service to grow subscription revenue.
CNN’s Clare Duffy contributed to this report.