Elon Musk announces temporary daily Twitter post reading limits

1 Jul 2023

Saturday, numerous Twitter users from various nations encountered difficulties and delays while trying to access the popular social media platform.

"Rate Limit Exceeded" and "#TwitterDown" are currently the most popular subjects on the application in the United States, for individuals who have access to it. The former has accumulated more than 40,000 tweets as of Saturday midday.

According to DownDetector, there were first indications of service disruptions around 8 am EST, and the number of reports significantly increased throughout the morning. By noon EST, the website had received over 7,400 reports of outages as evidenced by DownDetector's data.

Several individuals, including CNN reporters, noticed that their content streams were not loading and instead encountered an error notification stating, "Apologies, you have reached the limit of your activity. Please wait momentarily and attempt again." Likewise, some individuals shared complaints about encountering issues where the website was unable to retrieve tweets.

Shortly after users started reporting issues, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk took to Twitter and stated that temporary restrictions were implemented on the website "in response to excessive data scraping and system manipulation."

According to his tweet, verified users can only browse through a maximum of 6,000 posts daily, whereas unverified users are restricted to just 600 posts. As for brand new unverified accounts, they are permitted to access up to 300 posts per day.

Musk initiated the provision of a blue authentication symbol for individuals who enroll in Twitter Blue, a subscription service, with the aim of expanding the company's monetary gains.

Afterwards, Musk announced that he will soon elevate the cap to 8,000 tweets per day for users with verified accounts, while unverified users will be limited to 800 tweets and new unverified accounts will have a cap of 400 tweets.

A lot of people openly shared their annoyance with the connectivity issues. Some of the popular subjects being discussed in the United States were: "What on earth is happening to Twitter" and "Appreciation for Elon."

Only a day ago, it seemed like Twitter was limiting access to its platform for individuals who were not logged in. It wasn't certain whether this alteration was a deliberate update to their policies or a technical issue. The majority of the issues reported on Saturday were predominantly experienced on the website, accounting for 44%, while 39% of reported problems occurred on the app.

CNN has tried to contact Twitter for a statement, however, the platform replied with an automated symbol representing feces.

In March, there were widespread issues affecting Twitter users, which marked one of the biggest periods of service interruptions since Elon Musk assumed control. Around 8,000 individuals encountered disruptions during that particular incident.

Musk is attempting to revive the platform, which experienced a mass departure of advertisers, by bringing on board a fresh CEO, Linda Yaccarino.