Elon Musk-owned Twitter is limiting the daily number of tweets users can read per day, after a global outage that affected thousands of users on Saturday.
In a tweet, Musk said that verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day. Unverified accounts can only read 600 posts a day and new unverified users can only access 300 posts a day. The 'temporary limits' were being applied to "address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation," Musk said.
Social media platform Twitter was hit with a global outage on Saturday as thousands of users complained about not being able to refresh the site and access tweets.
Some users saw the error 'cannot retrieve tweets' or 'rate limit exceeded' as they tried to load the home page. According to reports, this is the third such outage this year that platform faced.
On February 8, it was reported that many Twitter users were unable to tweet, follow accounts or access their direct messages as the Elon Musk-owned platform experienced a slew of technical glitches.
Similarly on March 6, Twitter reportedly experienced a ‘bevvy’ of glitches. Some users were unable to log in and images were not loading for others.
Back in November, engineers who left Twitter described for The Associated Press why they expect considerable unpleasantness for Twitter's more than 230 million users now that well over two-thirds of Twitter's pre-Musk core services engineers are apparently gone.
One Twitter engineer, who had worked in core services, told the AP in November that engineering team clusters were down from about 15 people pre-Musk — not including team leaders, who were all laid off — to three or four before even more resignations.
Then more institutional knowledge that can't be replaced overnight walked out the door.
"Everything could break," the programmer said.
#TwitterDown and #RateLimitExceeded are the top two trending hashtags being used for those who can still access the app.
