Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, announced that the social media platform has imposed temporary limits on the number of tweets users can read each day. In a recent tweet, Musk revealed that unverified accounts can access up to 600 posts daily. Verified accounts have a limit of 6,000 posts per day, while newly unverified accounts can only view 300 posts daily.
The decision to implement these temporary limits comes as a response to “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation. Musk stated that the platform was facing significant data pilferage, which was negatively impacting the service for regular users.
As a result of these issues, Twitter introduced a “temporary emergency measure” on Friday, requiring users to log in to view the platform’s content.
According to Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages, at 16:12 BST, there was a peak of 5,126 reports of difficulties accessing Twitter in the UK.
Elon Musk acquired Twitter last year for $44 billion (£35 billion) after a series of negotiations. Following the acquisition, he made the decision to reduce the workforce from nearly 8,000 employees to about 1,500. This move generated concerns about the platform’s stability, particularly with engineers being among those laid off.
In an interview with the BBC, Musk acknowledged some glitches but reassured that outages were short-lived, and the platform was functioning well as of April.
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:
– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023