Amid an extended outage that has disrupted users’ ability to access new posts, Twitter is implementing limits on the number of tweets its users can read. Elon Musk, the owner of the service, revealed the revised usage quotas in a tweet.
Verified account holders will be able to view a maximum of 6,000 posts daily, while unverified users face a significantly reduced limit of 600 posts. Newly registered, unverified users will encounter even tighter restrictions, with a meager allowance of only 300 posts per day. However, Musk has since increased these limits to 10,000, 1,000, and 500, respectively.
Musk explained that Twitter is grappling with “extreme levels of data scraping” from numerous organizations and instances of “system manipulation.” The imposed constraints are deemed necessary measures to address these pressing issues. However, Musk did not disclose the identities of those scraping Twitter’s data or the duration of the problem, nor did he provide further details on the system manipulation claims.
In the past, Musk has expressed concerns about data scraping on Twitter and hinted at taking action against the culprits. He previously expressed outrage over Microsoft’s alleged “illegal” use of Twitter’s data and threatened legal action.
However, according to a developer, the main culprit behind Twitter’s ongoing struggle this week appears to be Twitter itself. A bug in Twitter’s web app is causing requests to be sent to the platform in an infinite loop.
These limitations come in response to a significant number of users complaining about Twitter’s failure to display newer tweets on Saturday, instead encountering the “rate limit exceeded” error.
This is not the first technical challenge that Twitter has faced in recent months, nor is it the first instance of devising unorthodox solutions to mitigate such situations. Earlier this week, Twitter restricted access to its platform for users who were not logged into an account.
The timing of this hiccup coincides with reports of social media giant Meta preparing to launch its own Twitter competitor.
