On Saturday, Elon Musk announced on Twitter that he is limiting the number of tweets users can read due to issues with accessing the platform. According to CNBC, thousands of individuals reported encountering difficulties on social media.
According to Musk, verified accounts are now restricted to a maximum of 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts face a limit of only 600 posts per day. Additionally, new unverified users have an even lower cap of 300 posts per day.
He stated that the rate limits for different user types would be raised in the near future. Verified users would see an increase to 8,000, unverified users to 800, and new unverified users to 400. However, approximately three hours later, Musk tweeted an update stating, “Now it’s 10k, 1k & 0.5k.”
Musk clarified in his initial tweet that these changes were temporary and aimed at tackling excessive data scraping and system manipulation. This incident marks the most recent significant service disruption since Musk took over the social media platform in the latter part of last year.
Numerous individuals attempting to use Twitter’s website or mobile app encountered an error message stating “Rate limit exceeded” or “Cannot retrieve tweets.” Over 7,300 users reported problems with Twitter on Downdetector’s website around 11 a.m. ET. However, by Saturday night, the number of reports had decreased to the 600s. In response to CNBC’s inquiry, Twitter expressed its usual response using a poop emoji.
Twitter has experienced several instances of technical issues in recent months, and Saturday’s outage is just one of them. In February, users faced a 90-minute period where they couldn’t post on the site due to a notification stating, “You are over the daily limit for sending Tweets.”
Additionally, users encountered temporary difficulties accessing links and loading images in March. Notably, these outages occurred alongside reports of a data center closure and significant layoffs at Twitter, which Elon Musk stated were crucial for the company’s financial well-being.
