TweetDeck suffers as Musk enforces read limits on Twitter

Over the weekend, Elon Musk limited the number of tweets users can read in a day, which he said was to prevent data scraping. While this measure has affected all Twitter users, TweetDeck users in particular are today reporting major problems, including notifications and entire columns failing to load.

Musk initially enforced read-limits of 6,000 daily posts for verified users and 600 daily posts for unverified users. Hours later, he increased these limits to 10,000 tweets and 1,000 tweets respectively. Given that TweetDeck loads up multiple tweets through various columns simultaneously, it’s likely that the effects of the read restrictions are amplified within TweetDeck.

Engineer Molly White noted that most of the calls on TweetDeck are returning multiple errors after the app has been open for a few minutes

Many users also noted that their home timeline is loading, but other columns including notifications, mentions, and likes are facing issues.

TweetDeck’s future

The last we heard about TweetDeck officially from the company was when it shut down the Mac app in June 2022 — before Musk had taken over the company. At the time, Twitter said it was testing a new version of the TweetDeck web app in select geographies. However, we haven’t heard anything about TweetDeck’s future under the new management, though there have been ongoing rumors that the company would turn it into a paid feature.

Last week, Twitter also put a restriction on viewing tweets without a login. It seems the company is trying to disallow data scraping by individuals or businesses looking to train AI models. Musk said this was a “temporary emergency measure” as Twitter was getting “data pillaged,” which affected user experience. However, Musk’s measures have also been detrimental to the user experience, as people are quickly hitting rate limits on the platform, including paying “verified” users.