It started with sudden changes as to who could view tweets, followed by sudden changes as to how many tweets users could view, and even times when many users couldn’t see tweets at all.
By Monday morning, most of the website’s issues appeared to have rolet been resolved. It remained unclear, however, just what people could expect from the platform. Several users of Twitter’s dashboard application TweetDeck, a tool that allows users to monitor multiple Twitter timelines and profiles simultaneously on side-by-side columns, reported they could not load tweets.
“We’re aware that our ability to crawl Twitter.com has been limited, affecting our ability to display tweets and pages from the site in search results,” a Google spokesperson said. “Websites have control over whether crawlers can access their content.”
It was at least the second time this year that major changes to Twitter coincided with technical problems. In March, multiple Twitter features malfunctioned after the company made changes to its Application Programming Interface, which allows developers to build programs that can interact with the platform.
On Saturday, Musk said unverified users would only be able to read 600 tweets a day. He then changed the figure a few times. Most recently, according to Musk, verified users can see up to 10,000 posts a day, unverified users can see 1,000 posts a day, and brand-new users can see 500 posts a day.
Around the same time, Twitter users started reporting issues accessing the platform’s primary service, encountering the “Rate limit exceeded” message instead of the infinite stream of tweets they had come to expect. Thousands of users reported trouble loading content on Twitter.