Twitter owner Elon Musk announced Saturday the site has applied temporary limits “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”

The news came hours after users across several countries were unable to access the social media site, or faced difficulty and delays, Saturday. Many received “rate limit exceeded” notifications.

“Rate Limit Exceeded” and “#TwitterDown” were trending as a result. Reports of outages began early Saturday morning, according to DownDetector, and only increased.

Musk announced verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts are limited to 600. New unverified accounts are at 300 posts a day. It was unclear how the site was calculating what counted as a read tweet.

Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October and took the company private.

Mark Heim is a reporter for The Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @Mark_Heim. He can be heard on “The Opening Kickoff” on WNSP-FM 105.5 FM in Mobile or on the free Sound of Mobile App from 6 to 9 a.m. daily.