Elon Musk said on Saturday, just hours after thousands of users reported widespread problems using the site, that Twitter was limiting the number of posts users could view per day to address concerns about data scraping. announced a temporary ban.
Many of these users reported seeing an error message that they had “exceeded” their “rate limit”, suggesting they violated Twitter’s rules and downloaded and viewed too many tweets.
Mr. Musk Said On Friday, he said that “hundreds of organizations” are obtaining Twitter data through a process called scraping, which “impacts real-world user experience,” but how long the restrictions will last and what the restrictions will be. He didn’t say what would trigger the cancellation.
He initially said that verified accounts would be limited to viewing 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts would be limited to 600 posts per day, and new unverified accounts would be limited to 300 posts per day.
About two hours later, he raised those limits to 8,000 for certified, 800 for uncertified, and 400 for new uncertified, and then again on Saturday evening at 10,000, 1,000, and 500. raised to
“I got rate limited because I read all the posts about rate limiting,” Musk said. Said on Twitter.
The billionaire has vocally disliked organizations that scrape Twitter and use tweets for research and training artificial intelligence programs.
But Saturday’s changes sparked some frustration with the platform among some users, with many wondering why their online activity was so drastically restricted.
The phrase “rate limit exceeded” trended on Twitter, and memes spread on the site about people being inconvenienced by the new policy. According to Down Detector, a website that tracks bug reports on multiple websites, user reports of Twitter’s problems spiked on Saturday.
Others had more practical concerns, such as how the daily limit would affect how users monitor severe weather on the platform. This often requires scrolling through dozens of updates, alerts, and warnings.
Alabama meteorologist James Spann said, “Today’s Twitter change is a complete trash can fire.” Said on Twitter. “Unless something changes, this platform is of little use to those of us in the weather industry right now.”
An email was returned to Twitter’s communications department requesting comment, with a poop emoji attached.
Since Musk’s acquisition in October and the move to cut more than 75% of the company’s workforce, Twitter has become less stable, with features and entire sites sometimes going down without explanation.
Two employees said their engineers spent Saturday in a private Slack channel trying to diagnose the problem. According to those people, Twitter salespeople noticed that some ads weren’t showing on the social network and asked what they should tell their advertising clients.
According to internal documents obtained by The New York Times, Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, down 59% from the same period last year.
The company regularly misses its U.S. weekly sales forecast, sometimes by up to 30%, according to the documents.
The Twitter frenzy continues to motivate some users to try out other similar social media sites. Examples include Mastodon, which aims to be a “viable alternative to Twitter,” and the social network Bluesky, which offers many of the same core features as Twitter. Twitter does.
Bluesky is currently invite-only, but the company’s name trended on Twitter on Saturday.
One Twitter user seemed bored on Saturday, writing, “I need the Bluesky code, you bastard.”
