Over the past few days there have been reports from Webmasters that changing the crawl rate in Google Webmaster Tools has prevented Google from indexing their Sitemap files.

A Google Webmaster Help thread has reports of this issue dating back five days with several webmasters complaining thereafter.

The error webmasters are seeing read:

Why is this happening? It seems to only happen when you change the crawl rate to a manual setting but I cannot confirm that for sure.

One webmaster effected by this said:

So far Google has not addressed these concerns in the forum.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.

Update: Googler, JohnMu replied to the thread with more details. He said: