Twitter is putting limits to how many tweets its users can read as the Elon Musk-owned service suffers extended outage that has stymied users’ ability to track new posts.
In a tweet, Musk detailed the revised usage quotas. Verified account holders can peruse a maximum of 6,000 posts daily, while unverified users must contend with a drastically reduced limit of 600 posts.
Newly registered, unverified users face even tighter restrictions with an allowance of a mere 300 posts per day, according to the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive. (He has since increased the limit to 10,000, 1,000 and 500.)
Musk said that Twitter is wrestling with “extreme levels of data scraping” from “several hundred organizations” and “system manipulation.” These new constraints, he says, are an essential measure to curb these pressing issues. Musk did not say who was scraping Twitter’s data — or how long the issue had persisted — nor did he elaborate on the system manipulation claim.
The billionaire has previously expressed concerns about data scraping at Twitter and suggested that he may take action against the bad actors. Musk was briefly outraged over Microsoft “illegally” using Twitter’s data and threatened that it was “lawsuit time.”
However, a developer claims that Twitter appears to be fighting Twitter itself this week as the big bad wolf. The web client for Twitter has a flaw that causes queries to loop endlessly to Twitter.
Tens of thousands of users complained on Saturday that Twitter was not updating their feeds with more recent posts, leading to the restriction. Instead, the “rate limit exceeded” warning appeared to users.
This is not the first technical issue Twitter has encountered in recent months, nor is it the first time an unconventional solution has been developed to stabilise the situation.
Twitter started limiting access to its site earlier this week for those who aren’t logged in.
The setback occurs as social media juggernaut Meta is apparently getting ready to introduce its own Twitter rival.
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