As thousands of Twitter users reported problems trying to access the social media site on Saturday, Elon Musk tweeted that he was limiting the daily number of tweets users can read.
In a tweet On Saturday afternoon, Musk said that verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day. For unverified accounts, the number drops dramatically to 600 posts per day. New unverified users can only access 300 posts per day.
In an update, he said that the rate limits would soon be increased to 8,000 for verified users, 800 for unverified users and 400 for new unverified users.
Musk said in his original tweet that the change is temporary and was put in place to “address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.” Is the last widespread disruption since acquiring the social networking site late last year.
Many users who tried to access or post content on the Twitter website or mobile app received a “Rate limit exceeded” or “Unable to retrieve tweets” error message. As of 11:00 a.m. ET, more than 7,300 people reported problems with Twitter on the website Download detector.
Twitter responded to CNBC’s request for comment with its usual poop emoji.
Saturday’s outage isn’t the first time Twitter has run into technical difficulties in recent months. In February, users were unable to post to the site for about 90 minutes after receiving a message saying, “You have exceeded your daily tweet limit.” In March, users were temporarily unable to click on links or upload images.
Other outages coincided with reports of a data center closure i mass layoffs on Twitter, which Musk claimed were necessary for the company’s financial health.
