Thousands of Twitter users report problems accessing site as Elon Musk says new limits have been installed

Many Twitter users encountered difficulties when trying to use the social media platform on Saturday. In response to this, Elon Musk took to Twitter and declared that he will be imposing a restriction on the number of tweets users can read each day.

In a Twitter message on Saturday afternoon, Musk mentioned that confirmed profiles can only consume a maximum of 6,000 posts within a 24-hour period. However, for unconfirmed profiles, this limit significantly decreases to 600 posts per day. Meanwhile, newly registered unconfirmed users have an even more restricted access, allowing them to view only 300 posts daily.

In a recent announcement, he expressed that the limits for usage would soon be raised. Verified users would witness an increase to 8,000, while unverified users would now get a limit of 800, and new unverified users would be provided with a limit of 400. However, approximately three hours later, he posted on Twitter that these numbers had evolved to "Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k."

Musk stated in his initial tweet that the modification is only temporary and was implemented to combat severe instances of data scraping and system manipulation. This incident marks the most recent extensive interruption since he obtained ownership of the social networking platform towards the end of last year.

Numerous individuals who attempted to utilize or publish material on Twitter's site or mobile application encountered an error message stating "Rate limit exceeded" or "Cannot retrieve tweets." As of 11 a.m. ET, over 7,300 individuals notified Downdetector, a website specialized in tracking service outages, about the problems they faced when using Twitter.

Twitter replied to CNBC's comment request with its usual feces emoji.

Twitter has faced technical problems on multiple occasions in the past few months. Back in February, users encountered a frustrating issue where they were unable to post on the platform for around an hour and a half. They received a notification stating, "You have exceeded the daily limit for sending Tweets." Similarly, in March, users experienced a temporary glitch where they couldn't click on links or load images.

Additional service disruptions coincided with the mentioned occurrence of a facility shutdown and significant workforce reductions at Twitter. Musk argued that these actions were vital to ensure the company's financial robustness.

Minyvonne Burke holds a senior position as a reporter specializing in breaking news at NBC News.