For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails
Sign up to our free breaking news emails
Twitter has applied temporary reading limits to address “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, Elon Musk said in a post on the social media platform on Saturday.
Thousands of people complained about being unable to access Twitter on Saturday. It came after Mr Musk declared that verified accounts are now temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, unverified accounts limited to 600 and new unverified accounts limited to 300.
It comes after Twitter announced on Friday that it will now require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, which Mr Musk described as a “temporary emergency measure”.
Mr Musk tweeted on Saturday: “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, Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day, New unverified accounts to 300/day.”
After Mr Musk’s announcement, the hashtag "RIP Twitter" was trending as well as “Twitter Down” and “Space Karen”.
Recommended
- Twitter limiting number of tweets users can read per day, Elon Musk announces
- Is Twitter down? Thousands of users complain of issues with social media website and app
- Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg could have cage fight in Roman Colosseum
Elon Musk announced the ‘temporary measures’ via his Twitter account
(Twitter)
Mr Musk later tweeted: “Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits.”
The issues were first reported around midday on Saturday but there were thousands of reports about the site by 6pm, according to Downdetector. In the UK, a peak of 5,126 people complained of problems accessing Twitter at 4.12pm.
It comes after another outage in February when many users were unable to tweet, follow accounts or access their direct messages after the platform was plagued by widespread technical problems.
The founder and chief engineer of SpaceX previously expressed concern about artificial intelligence firms such as ChatGPT using Twitter's data to train their language models, The Guardian reported.
Mr Musk took over Twitter in October after buying it for 44 billion dollars (£35.5 billion).
After taking over, he laid off some 80 per cent of its 8,000 global staff. He later admitted it resulted in the platform losing a large amount of its functionality.
He also oversaw the scrapping of legacy “blue ticks”, which verified a user’s identity and were replaced by a paid-for subscription called Twitter Blue.
High-profile figures and celebrities said the move leaves the platform open to imposters and disinformation.
Users who pay £9.60 a month, or £115.20 annually, receive the blue tick and can make longer tweets up to 10,000 characters.
Other select features available only to subscribers include non-fungible token (NFT) profile pictures, making changes to published tweets and seeing around 50 per cent fewer ads.
In December, just weeks after the takeover, Mr Musk tweeted: “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job.”
Recommended
- Twitter hacker who took over Musk, Obama, Biden accounts gets prison sentence
- Windrush trolls taken down after public criticism
- Elon Musk sparks outrage with threat to ban ‘cisgender’ as a ‘slur’ on Twitter
The pledge came after millions of Twitter users asked him to step down in a poll Mr Musk created and promised to abide by.
In May, Mr Musk confirmed that advertising executive Linda Yaccarino, formerly of NBCUniversal, was replacing him as Twitter’s chief executive.
✕
Subscribe to Independent Premium to bookmark this article
Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today.
SubscribeAlready subscribed? Log in
Popular videos
{{/link}}