Twitter, the popular social media platform owned by Elon Musk, has imposed limitations on the number of tweets users can read as the service grapples with an extended outage that has hindered users’ ability to access new posts.
Musk took to Twitter to announce the revised usage quotas. Verified account holders can now view a maximum of 6,000 posts per day, while unverified users face a significantly reduced limit of 600 posts. Newly registered, unverified users will face even tighter restrictions, with an allowance of only 300 posts per day. However, Musk later increased the limits to 10,000, 1,000, and 500, respectively. He cited Twitter’s struggle with “extreme levels of data scraping” from numerous organizations and system manipulation as the reasons behind these measures. However, he did not disclose the identity of those scraping Twitter’s data or the duration of the issue, nor did he elaborate on the system manipulation claim.
Musk has previously expressed concerns about data scraping on Twitter and indicated that he may take action against the responsible parties. He was particularly incensed when Microsoft was allegedly “illegally” utilizing Twitter’s data, stating that it was time for a lawsuit. However, according to a developer, this week’s major issue seems to be an internal bug in Twitter’s web app, causing requests to loop infinitely.
The decision to impose post limits follows numerous complaints from tens of thousands of users who reported on Saturday that their Twitter feeds were not displaying newer tweets. Instead, they were confronted with the error message “rate limit exceeded.”
This is not the first technical setback that Twitter has encountered in recent months, nor is it the first instance in which an unconventional solution has been devised to address the situation. Earlier this week, Twitter restricted access to its platform for users who were not logged into an account.
The timing of this outage is notable, as it coincides with reports that social media giant Meta is preparing to launch its own rival platform to Twitter. The competition between the two platforms is expected to intensify in the near future.
