Elon Musk issues temporary limit on number of Twitter posts users can view

Twitter owner Elon Musk announced Saturday that the social media platform had temporarily implemented daily limits on the number of posts that users can view. 

Elon Musk, who took over the platform in 2022, tweeted around 1 p.m. about post reading limits "to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation," saying that the following limits had been temporarily applied: Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts per day, unverified accounts to 600 posts per day and new unverified accounts to 300 per day.

Later in the afternoon, he tweeted that "rate limits will be increasing soon," and upped the daily limits to 8,000 posts for verified accounts, 800 for unverified accounts and 400 for new unverified accounts. By the evening, he said he had increased the limits "now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k."

His announcement came after thousands of Twitter users reported that they were unable to use the social media app, prompting hashtags that included "TwitterDown" and "RateLimitExceeded."

The outage began Saturday around 8 a.m. EST and continued throughout the afternoon, according to DownDetector. At the height of the outage at 1 p.m., there were over 7,000 outage reports regarding the website.

Some users flagged issues that included being unable to retrieve tweets, or the error message, "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again." 

Others tweeted Musk directly, saying things like, "Hey Elon, my Twitter isn't working" and "A limit on reading tweets?"

Twitter users faced wide-ranging service disruptions in March, one of the largest outages since Musk took over. More than 8,000 users reported disruptions.

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• Elon Musk
• Twitter