While playing with twitter search for few minutes, suddenly a message popped up saying that “Sorry! You’ve hit your hourly usage limit. Try again soon”. I was sure that it was because of my last few minutes excessive search requests. I also noticed that my searches were failing at that moment. So I waited just a couple of minutes and tried again. Mysteriously the search was working fine just after 2 minutes wait. Somehow my belief was that twitter doesn’t block for an hour, it may be less than that. I was curious to see what’s the maximum number of search request is required to reach the limit. So I started to search again. This time I was searching with all good words and I noticed that even after 50+ requests it’s not blocking me. Then I started to use bad words like my first attempt (mixing up with special character, XSS attack, missing word etc.) and interestingly just after few tries, the message again came up. But interestingly this time search was not blocked. The search result was coming nicely but the message was appearing with every request. I tried with changing browser, re-login, changing IP etc. But the result was same. Funny bug! from twitter.
Video: Sorry! You’ve hit your hourly usage limit. Try again soon. – A fake message from twitter.