As thousands of Twitter users reported problems attempting to access the social media site Saturday, Elon Musk tweeted he is limiting the daily number of tweets users can read.
In a tweet Saturday afternoon, Musk said that verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day. For unverified accounts, the number drops drastically to 600 posts a day. New unverified users can only access 300 posts a day.
In an update, he said rate limits would soon increase to 8,000 for verified users, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified. About three hours later, Musk tweeted, “Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k.”
Musk said in his original tweet that the change is temporary and was put in place to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.” It’s the latest widespread outage since he acquired the social media site late last year.
Many users who tried to access or post content on Twitter’s website or mobile app were met with a “Rate limit exceeded” or “Cannot retrieve tweets” error message. Around 11 a.m. ET, more than 7,300 people reported issues with Twitter to the website Downdetector. That number had dropped into the 600s by Saturday night.
Twitter responded to CNBC’s request for comment with its customary poop emoji.
Saturday’s outage is not the first time Twitter has suffered technical difficulties in recent months. In February, users were unable to post on the site for about 90 minutes after receiving a message that read, “You are over the daily limit for sending Tweets.” In March, users were temporarily unable to click on links or load images.
Other outages coincided with reports of a data center closure and massive layoffs at Twitter, which Musk claimed were necessary for the financial health of the company.
