Elon Musk is limiting the daily number of tweets users can read, he announced Saturday after thousands of users reported problems trying to access the social-media app.
In a tweet Saturday afternoon, Musk said that verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day. For unverified accounts, the number drops drastically to 600 posts a day. New unverified users can only access 300 posts a day.
Musk said the new change is temporary and was put in place to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.”
To critics, including many longtime users, t’s the latest outage since Musk acquired the social-media site late last year.
Earlier Saturday many users complained of seeing the “Cannot retrieve tweets” error message as they tried to view or post tweets. Some users also reported seeing a “Rate limit exceeded” message.
Users reported receiving the message “rate-limit exceeded” on their “For You” pages, whose content usually consists of personal, curated content — and which, separately, longtime users say, have lately been pushing right-wing content in which these users say they have never demonstrated any interest.
Several thousand people complained of issues Saturday on the Down Detector site, including the inability to retrieve tweets, missing timelines and followers disappearing.
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search giant Google responded by removing more than half of the links to Twitter pages among Google search results, it was reported Monday by the Search Engine Roundtable site.
A screen capture of the “Rate limit exceeded” message as seen on Saturday.
This is the third time that the platform has faced a noteworthy outage. On March 6, it was reported that Twitter experienced glitches as links stopped working, some users were unable to log in and images were not loading for others.
Similarly, on Feb. 8, it was reported that many Twitter users found themselves unable to tweet, follow accounts or access their direct messages as the platform experienced technical problems.
One social-media user wrote on Down Detector: “I joined Twitter in 2009, and I’ve had more problems since Elon took over than the whole time before that. Insanity.”
Even those who have access to the platform have complained about issues.