Global Courant
SAN FRANCISCO –
Thousands of people filed complaints Saturday about problems accessing Twitter after owner Elon Musk restricted most users to viewing 600 tweets a day — restrictions he described as an attempt to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data from the site.
The crackdown began to have ripple effects early Saturday, with more than 7,500 people at one point reporting problems using the social media service, based on complaints registered on Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages. While that’s a relatively small number of Twitter’s more than 200 million users worldwide, the problem was widespread enough for the .TwitterDown hashtag to become popular in some parts of the world.
The service outages came a day after Twitter began requiring people to sign into the service to view tweets and profiles — a change from the old practice of allowing anyone to read the chatter about what Musk has often touted as the world’s digital town square since its purchase last year for $44 billion.
In a tweet on Friday, Musk described the new restrictions as a temporary measure taken because “there was so much data looting that it was a humiliating service for normal users!” Musk addressed the measures in a tweet on Saturday announcing that unauthenticated accounts will be temporarily limited to reading 600 messages per day, while verified accounts will be able to browse up to 6,000 messages per day.
The restrictions could result in users being locked out of Twitter for a day after scrolling through hundreds of tweets.
The higher threshold allowed for verified accounts is part of a US$8 per month subscription service Musk rolled out earlier this year in an effort to boost Twitter revenue that has plummeted since he took over the company and about three-quarters of the staff to save costs and avoid bankruptcy.
Advertisers have since capped their spending on Twitter, in part due to changes that have allowed for more sometimes hateful and prickly content that offends a larger portion of the service’s audience. Musk recently hired Linda Yaccarino, longtime NBC Universal executive, to become Twitter’s CEO in an effort to win back advertisers.
An Associated Press investigation into Saturday’s access issues led to a crudely automated response that sends Twitter to most press inquiries without addressing the question.
