Twitter limits the number of tweets users can read amid extended outage

Twitter is putting limits to how many tweets its users can read as the Elon Musk-owned service suffers extended outage that has stymied users’ ability to track new posts.

In a tweet, Musk detailed the revised usage quotas. Verified account holders can peruse a maximum of 6,000 posts daily, while unverified users must contend with a drastically reduced limit of 600 posts.

Newly registered, unverified users face even tighter restrictions with an allowance of a mere 300 posts per day, according to the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive. (He has since increased the limit to 10,000, 1,000 and 500.)

Musk said that Twitter is wrestling with “extreme levels of data scraping” from “several hundred organizations” and “system manipulation.” These new constraints, he says, are an essential measure to curb these pressing issues. Musk did not say who was scraping Twitter’s data — or how long the issue had persisted — nor did he elaborate on the system manipulation claim.

The billionaire has previously expressed concerns about data scraping at Twitter and suggested that he may take action against the bad actors. Musk was briefly outraged over Microsoft “illegally” using Twitter’s data and threatened that it was “lawsuit time.”

According to a developer, however, the big bad wolf that Twitter is fighting against this week appears to be Twitter itself. A bug in Twitter’s web app is sending requests to Twitter in an infinite loop.

The curb follows tens of thousands of users complaining on Saturday that Twitter was not populating their feeds with newer tweets. Instead, users were greeted with the “rate limit exceeded” error.

This is not the first technical hiccup that Twitter has grappled with in recent months, nor is it the first instance of an unorthodox solution being devised to hold the situation together.

Earlier this week, Twitter started to restrict access to its platform for anyone not logged into an account.

The hiccup arrives at a time when social media giant Meta is reportedly preparing to launch its own Twitter rival.