What does rate limit exceeded mean on Twitter? Hilarious Elon Musk memes erupt in wake of global outage

American business magnate and Twitter's CEO Elon Musk sparked hilarious memes online after he announced new temporary limits on verified and unverified accounts on the social media platform. On July 1, real-time websites monitor site DownDetector showed over 7,000 outage reports across Twitter as #TwitterDown and Rate Limit Exceeded began trending on the platform.

Reportedly, users complained that their Twitter feeds were not loading, and a message reading, “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again” flashed on their screens.

Soon after, Elon Musk addressed the problem via a series of tweets stating that the platform has applied temporary restrictions on the number of tweets they can view “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”

As per the new policy, verified users are now limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, unverified users can read 600 posts, and new unverified users can old read 300 posts every day. Later he posted that the limit will "soon" increase to 8,000 tweets a day for verified users and 800 and 400 respectively for unverified and new unverified accounts.

Twitter reactions on Elon Musk's Twitter announcing new policy for Tweets

After Elon Musk's new policy about the number of posts a verified vs a non-verified user can read went viral, Twitterati responded hilariously. The announcement led to #TwitterDown and Rate Limit Exceeded trending on the platform, with the latter meaning that the Twitter user would be able to scroll up until they reach their daily limit.

Several users responded with memes and GIFs on how the people would react now that the new policy has been implemented. Others slammed Musk with the #RIPTwitter, one of them suggesting that the CEO is sinking the social media platform like the iceberg did to the Titanic.

Ever since Elon Musk took over as the CEO of Twitter, the social media platform has seen several changes. Twitter's application programming interface (API), which is often used by third-party applications and scholars, including AI businesses, has already begun to charge users for access.

Recently, Twitter seemed to be blocking access to its site for anybody who was not signed in. It was unclear if the change was a deliberate policy update or a mistake. The website received the most reports of issues on Saturday (44%), followed by the app (39%), as per BBC.

This comes after Elon Musk previously pushed people to buy Twitter's paid subscription service, Twitter Blue. It might be possible that the new tweets policy on the platform would unlock unlimited posts with its subscription, with Musk planning a bigger model to regulate.

Earlier, the social media platform provided blue tick or "verified" status free of cost to the profiles of celebrities and other organizations. However, ever since Elon Musk took over, people now have to pay $8 per month to be verified and stand out of the crowd.

This is not the first time that Twitter has faced technical difficulties. Back in March 2023, Twitterati faced service disruptions, the largest since Musk took over, with over 8,000 users reporting inconvenience.

Musk hired Linda Yaccarino as the platform's new CEO to try to turn things around after advertisers left the platform.

About the author

Nikita is a Celebrity Trends writer at SK POP. She completed her master's degree in Journalism from Symbiosis International University, Pune. She has previously contributed to Zenger News, Stardust Magazine, and Outlook Traveller Magazine.

In her spare time, Nikita enjoys painting, photography, dancing, and streaming her favorite shows.

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