Global Courant
As thousands of Twitter users on Saturday reported problems attempting to access the social media site, Elon Musk tweeted that he is limiting the daily number of tweets users can read.
In a tweet On Saturday afternoon, Musk said verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 messages per day. For unauthenticated accounts, the number drops drastically to 600 posts per day. New unauthenticated users can only access 300 messages per day.
In an update, he said the speed limits would soon be increased to 8,000 for verified users, 800 for unauthenticated, and 400 for new unauthenticated users. About three hours later, he tweeted those numbers were “Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k.”
Musk said in his original tweet that the change is temporary and was introduced to “address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.” It is the latest widespread outage since acquiring the social media site late last year.
Many users who tried to access or post content to the Twitter website or mobile app received the error message ‘Rate limit exceeded’ or ‘Failed to retrieve tweets’. As of 11 a.m. ET, more than 7,300 people reported problems with Twitter on the website Down detector.
Twitter responded to CNBC’s request for comment with the usual poop emoji.
Saturday’s outage isn’t the first time Twitter has had technical problems in recent months. In February, users were unable to post to the site for about 90 minutes after receiving a message that read, “You have exceeded the daily tweet sending limit.” In March, users were temporarily unable to click links or load images.
Other outages coincided with reports of a closure of the data center And massive layoffs on Twitter, which Musk claimed were necessary for the company’s financial health.
Elon Musk.Ludovic Marin / Pool / AFP via Getty Images file
