Twitter has on Saturday been hit by a global outage that is preventing thousands of users from accessing the social media platform, following which Twitter users slammed its billionaire owner Elon Musk. Many users have complained of seeing the “cannot retrieve tweets” error message when they try to view or post tweets while others reported seeing a “rate limit exceeded error message".
Twitter is yet to acknowledge the outage or provide any explanation for the cause of the problem.
" Twitter before Elon Musk >>> Twitter after Elon Musk. That’s the tweet," said a user of the social media platform.
"@elonmusk ser did you fire whole twitter devops team? or a person who was paying cloud bills?," asked a Twitter user referring to Twitter's new owner's various cost-cutting measures.
According to Down Detector, a site that tracks online service disruptions, over 4,000 reports of issues with Twitter have been logged so far.
Last month, Twitter had announced plans to focus on video, creator and commerce partnerships to revitalise the social media company's business beyond digital advertising.
Twitter has also begun charging users to access its application programming interface (API), used by third-party apps and researchers.
Rate Limit Exceeded and #TwitterDown became top trends on Twitter in no time with the platform's users facing constant glitches.
Twitter's new chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, is working on a slew of measures to bring back advertisers who left the platform under Elon Musk's ownership, including introducing a video ads service, pursuing more celebrities and raising headcount, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Wednesday.
Yaccarino, who started as CEO on June 5, is planning to launch full-screen, sound-on video ads that will be shown to users scrolling through Twitter's new short-video feed, the newspaper reported, citing three people familiar with the situation.
She is in talks about a broader partnership with Alphabet-owned GOOGL.O Google that would include advertising and access to some of Twitter's data, the report said.