Twitter owner Elon Musk on Saturday announced “temporary limits” on the number of tweets users are able to read, an announcement that comes amid reports of users having difficulty accessing the site.
Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last October and took the company private, said in a tweet “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits.”
Verified accounts “are limited to reading 6000 posts/day,” while unverified accounts were limited to 600 per day, Musk’s tweet said at about 1 p.m. ET Saturday,. New and unverified counts will have an even lower limit of 300, he said.
About two hours later, he tweeted, “Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified.”
Musk added, in what is a suspected trolling comment about all the commotion on Twitter: “Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits.”
Then, less than an hour later, Musk sent a subsequent tweet increasing limits to 10,000 for verified, 1,000 for unverified and 500 for new unverified users.
It was unclear how the site was calculating what counted as a read tweet. Also unclear: When the temporary limits, which were still in effect about 9 p.m. ET Saturday, would be lifted. USA TODAY reached out to Twitter for clarification and and received an automated message of a poop emoji, as is standard for the company.
Users reported seeing error messages that said, “rate limit exceeded” and “Cannot retrieve tweets” error messages while scrolling the site.
A USA TODAY journalist on Saturday was served multiple “rate limit exceeded” errors in the Twitter app after scrolling for a few minutes. It was not immediately clear whether this was as a result of the temporary limits or another glitch on the app.
The new viewing restrictions come a day after Musk said he was taking a “temporary emergency” measure to prevent people who are not signed into a Twitter account from viewing any tweets. He said the action was also to combat data scraping.
“This will be unlocked shortly,” Musk said Friday.
Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives questioned the strategy. “It’s changing the rules of the game with no warning and not a good look for the Twitter platform,” he told USA TODAY in an email exchange. “Frustration building among users.”
