It was a chaotic weekend on Twitter.
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.
A new error message — “Rate limit exceeded” — confused many Twitter users who were seeing it for the first time. When Elon Musk announced the platform was temporarily limiting the number of tweets users could view, it created more questions than answers.
By Monday morning, most of the website’s issues appeared to have 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.
It also remained unclear how the changes may affect Twitter’s viewability outside its platform. Google appeared to no longer be showing tweets at the top of some search results.
“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.
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