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Twitter limiting number of tweets users can read per day as thousands report problems with site
- The service disruptions cropped up a day after Twitter began requiring people to log on to the service to view tweets and profiles
- Twitter owner Elon Musk described the restrictions as an attempt to prevent unauthorised scraping of potentially valuable data from the site
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Thousands of people logged complaints about problems accessing Twitter on Saturday after owner Elon Musk limited most users to viewing 600 tweets a day – restrictions he described as an attempt to prevent unauthorised scraping of potentially valuable data from the site.
The crackdown began to have ripple effects early on Saturday, causing more than 7,500 people at one point to report problems using the social media service, based on complaints registered on Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages.
Although that is a relatively small number of Twitter’s more than 200 million worldwide users, the trouble was widespread enough to cause the #TwitterDown hashtag to trend in some parts of the world.
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The service disruptions cropped up a day after Twitter began requiring people to log on to the service to view tweets and profiles – a change in its long-time practice to allow all comers to peruse the chatter on what Musk has frequently touted as the world’s digital town square since buying it for US$44 billion last year.
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In a Friday tweet, Musk described the new restrictions as a temporary measure that was taken because “we were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
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