On Saturday, a large number of Twitter users reported encountering difficulties while attempting to access the social media platform. This followed the announcement made by Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, that the company was introducing new limitations on the number of tweets users could read on a daily basis. This sudden restriction to 10,000 posts per day for verified accounts caused a stir among users and resulted in widespread issues on the platform.
Elon Musk made this significant policy change public via a tweet on Saturday afternoon. In his announcement, Musk stated that the daily reading limit for verified accounts was initially set at 6,000 posts. For unverified accounts, this number was significantly lower, set at a limit of 600 posts. Moreover, newly registered unverified users found themselves with an even stricter limit, being able to access only 300 posts per day.
Not long after the initial announcement, Musk posted an update indicating that the daily reading limits would be increased in the near future. Specifically, the limits for verified users, unverified users, and new unverified users would be raised to 8,000, 800, and 400 posts respectively. Approximately three hours following this update, Musk once again took to Twitter to communicate that the new limits had been set at 10,000, 1,000, and 500 posts per day for each respective user category.
In his original announcement, Musk explained that the change was intended to be temporary. He asserted that the purpose of the new policy was to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.” This particular situation represents the latest in a series of technical issues that the platform has faced since Musk’s acquisition of the social media site in the previous year.
During the day, a significant number of users found themselves unable to access or post content on Twitter. This issue was not exclusive to a particular mode of access; users reported difficulties regardless of whether they were using Twitter’s website or mobile app. The most common error messages encountered were “Rate limit exceeded” or “Cannot retrieve tweets.” By 11 a.m. ET, the website Downdetector had received more than 7,300 reports of users experiencing problems with Twitter.
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In response to a request for comment from CNBC, Twitter sent back its customary poop emoji, providing no further clarification or information on the situation.
Unfortunately for users of the platform, this is not the first time Twitter has been subject to technical difficulties in recent months. In February, users found themselves unable to post on the site for approximately 90 minutes due to an error message stating, “You are over the daily limit for sending Tweets.” In a similar event in March, users were temporarily prevented from clicking on links or loading images.
These outages occurred concurrently with reports of a data center shutdown and significant layoffs at Twitter. Elon Musk has defended these decisions, asserting that they were necessary actions to ensure the company’s financial stability. As Twitter moves forward, its user base eagerly awaits resolutions to these recurring technical issues and further updates on the company’s policy changes.
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