Elon Musk hands down Twitter restrictions amid global outages

Social media giant Twitter faced widespread technical issues on Saturday morning, leading to temporary restrictions on the platform. Thousands of users found themselves without access as the company grappled with system manipulation and data scraping incidents. Twitter CEO Elon Musk took to the platform to address the situation and announce the implementation of “temporary limits” on the app in response to what he described as malicious activity.

“To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits,” Musk tweeted on Saturday afternoon.

The new restrictions specify that verified users can currently read up to 10,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts are limited to viewing 1,000 tweets daily. Newly-created unverified accounts face a further reduction, allowing them to read only 500 tweets a day.

Earlier in the day, Musk had initially announced more stringent rules, stating that verified accounts could read up to 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts were limited to 600 posts per day, and new unverified accounts could only read 300 posts per day.

These measures reflect Musk’s ongoing campaign against data scraping and platform manipulation, which have become persistent challenges for Twitter. On Friday, Musk clarified that the requirement for users to have an account to view tweets was a “temporary emergency measure” due to the excessive data pillaging that was degrading service quality for regular users.

The root cause of these changes appears to be the aggressive data scraping activities of hundreds of organizations. Musk suggested that artificial intelligence companies were to blame, indicating that both startups and major corporations were scraping vast amounts of data. This influx of activity has put a strain on Twitter’s servers, leading to the implementation of emergency measures to ensure the platform’s stability and protect user experience.

Many users have reported encountering error messages and difficulties accessing their timelines, with a recurring system message displaying: “Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments, then try again.”

Twitter is actively working to address the technical issues and restore full functionality to the platform. The temporary restrictions are intended to mitigate the impact of data scraping and system manipulation, safeguarding the platform’s integrity and ensuring a smooth user experience.

As the situation continues to unfold, Twitter users are advised to remain patient and await further updates from the company. Twitter is committed to resolving the issues promptly and restoring normal service as quickly as possible.