Elon Musk enacts temporary Twitter post reading limits
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If you tried to use Twitter on Saturday, you may have faced some complications. This is because Elon Musk enacted temporary Twitter post reading limits.
The billionaire owner tweeted that the site had applied temporary limits "to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation."
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day
The new quotas were as follows for a few hours: verified accounts were limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, unverified accounts were limited to just 600 and new unverified accounts were at 300 posts a day.
Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
This led to thousands of people on the social media platform seeing an error message saying, "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again." Others said they received errors saying the site cannot retrieve tweets.
Reports of the glitches began around 8 am EST and worsened throughout the day.
This led to people tweeting "Rate Limit Exceeded" and "#TwitterDown" with the two sentences becoming the top trending topics on the app in the U.S. for those who had access to it. The first sentence had been shared over 40,000 times as of Saturday noon.
Musk had also posted later in the day that he will increase the limit "soon" to 8,000 tweets a day for verified users, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified accounts. It seems that the more complaints piled up the more he increased the quotas.
This led many to signal their growing frustration with the new limits resulting in trending topics such as "Wtf twitter" and "Thanks Elon."
About an hour ago at 6 pm EST, Musk tweeted that quotas were "now" at 10,000, 1,000 and 500 respectively.
On Friday, the site also had another issue which may have been intentional or just a glitch: Twitter appeared to be restricting access to its platform for anyone not logged into an account.
We would reach out to Twitter to get a comment on all these recent changes and issues but the platform now has a policy that all journalist inquiries are met with a poop emoji. The policy has been in effect since March and does not seem to have changed despite the public having many questions about Musk's actions when it comes to the site.
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