July 1 is a national holiday in Canada for two reasons. The first is that it's Canada Day, celebrating the anniversary of Canadian Confederation which occurred on July 1, 1867.
The second reason is that it's the day free agency opens for the NHL.
The day typically means thousands of hockey fans across Canada and the world spend their day glued to their phones scrolling through Twitter, waiting to see who their team is signing. Unfortunately for them, Twitter is not cooperating.
Twitter users around the world are reporting an inability to see their Twitter feeds, receiving the error message "rate limit exceeded" or "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again."
For those still able to access the app, in many cases, Tweets can be sent but not seen. As a result, "#TwitterDown" and "Rate Limit Exceeded" are trending across Canada, but the tweets causing those topics to trend cannot be seen.
For hockey fans eager to get updates on free agency, this has been an immensely frustrating experience, especially for those unable to watch Sportsnet or TSN, who are broadcasting live coverage of free agent signings.
Typically, the trouble for hockey fans on Twitter is spoof accounts, with trolls pretending to be trade breakers like Elliotte Friedman, Pierre LeBrun, or Darren Dreger. As a positive, then, the Twitter outage is at least protecting hockey fans from those fake accounts.
"What a day for Twitter to break," quipped Friedman on Sportsnet's broadcast after breaking the Ottawa Senators signing Joonas Korpisalo to a five-year, $20 million contract.
Elon Musk bought the social media site in October of 2022 and subsequently fired thousands of employees, claiming they were not essential to running the site.
UPDATE: According to Musk, the "rate limit" messages are not a bug. Instead, they are a result of Twitter massively limiting the number of tweets any given user can view during the day.
The tweet is not going over well, with even some of Musk's most ardent supporters lamenting how unusable the social media site has been since this limitation was supposedly implemented.
