Twitter's Surprise: More Than Just Outages, Users Now Face Limitations! What's Happening?

Twitter's Surprise: More Than Just Outages, Users Now Face Limitations! What's Happening?

Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, with millions of users tweeting every day. However, on July 1, 2023, thousands of Twitter users across several countries reported outages, difficulty, and delays accessing the social media site. The error message that many users encountered was "rate limit exceeded," which means that they had exceeded the maximum number of API calls allowed on their account in one hour.

The Twitter API (application programming interface) is a set of protocols that allows developers to access Twitter data in their applications. Twitter has put in place new limits on the number of tweets, DMs, and accounts a regular user can follow in one day. For example, users may see the "rate limit exceeded" message if they exceed 500 DMs, 2400 tweets, or 400 accounts followed in one day.

In addition, Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced on July 1, 2023, that the blue bird app is taking steps to limit verified accounts to reading 6,000 posts daily, while unverified accounts will be limited to 1,000 posts per day. This move has riled Twitter users who are unhappy with the new clampdown.

The reasons for the new error messages on July 1, 2023, were not immediately clear. Fortune reached out to Twitter for comment but received no immediate reply from anyone at the company. However, we received the error message "Sorry, you are rate limited" when logged in and trying to view tweets from Musk, Fortune, and others.

If you encounter the "rate limit exceeded" message, there is not much you can do to avoid it. This is a Twitter enforced limitation. However, there are some steps you can take to avoid hitting the rate limit. For example, you can reduce the number of API calls you make by using caching or pagination. You can also use Twitter's REST API v2, which has higher rate limits than the previous version.

In conclusion, the "rate limit exceeded" error message on Twitter is a common issue that many users encounter. It is caused by exceeding the maximum number of API calls allowed on an account in one hour. While there is not much you can do to avoid hitting the rate limit, there are some steps you can take to reduce the number of API calls you make. Twitter has also put in place new limits on the number of tweets, DMs, and accounts a regular user can follow in one day.