Over the weekend, Twitter experienced accessibility issues and delays in multiple countries, leading to trending hashtags like “Rate Limit Exceeded” and “TwitterDown” in the United States. Users faced problems with loading tweets and received error messages stating they were rate limited. In response, Elon Musk tweeted that Twitter has temporarily imposed limitations due to data scraping and system manipulation concerns.
Elon Musk clarified that verified accounts can read up to 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts are limited to 600 posts, and new unverified accounts are restricted to only 300 posts. Considering the large volume of posts in the “for you” feed from accounts users don’t follow, these limits are easily reached, especially if a tweet receives significant attention with numerous replies.
Shortly after, Musk tweeted again to announce his plans to raise the rate limits. He stated that verified accounts would soon have a limit of 8,000 posts, unverified accounts 800, and new unverified accounts 400. Furthermore, he revealed his intention to further increase the rate limits to 10,000 for verified accounts, 1,000 for unverified accounts, and 500 for new unverified accounts. Since acquiring Twitter last year, Musk has been implementing a series of changes, which appear to be ongoing and continuously evolving. However, this recent modification has generated frustration and received universally negative feedback.
In a potential effort to boost its stagnant userbase, Twitter made a recent alteration to its settings where browsing tweets on the platform became inaccessible without signing into a Twitter account. This change was observed yesterday.
