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
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.
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!”
Musk elaborated on the measures in a Saturday tweet that announced unverified accounts will temporarily be limited to reading 600 posts per day while verified accounts will be able to scroll through up to 6,000 posts per day.
The higher threshold allowed on verified accounts is part of a US$8 per month subscription service that Musk rolled out earlier this year in an effort to boost Twitter revenue that has fallen sharply since he took over the company and laid off roughly three-fourths of the workforce to cuts costs and stave off bankruptcy.
Musk recently hired long-time NBC Universal executive Linda Yaccarino to become Twitter’s CEO in an effort to win back advertisers.