Twitter’s mercurial billionaire owner has announced a temporary limit on the number of posts you can read on the platform each day on July 1, with different amounts depending on your account’s verification status.
New unverified accounts are limited to reading just 300 tweets a day, with older unverified accounts having a cap of 600. Verified accounts are also not exempt from this change, but their limit is ten times higher, coming in at 6000. With scrolling down your feed counting as separate instances of reading each tweet, it’s little wonder that users all around the world are getting a related error message known as “rate limit exceeded.”
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Citing “extreme levels of data scraping [and] system manipulation”, Elon Musk has announced the limits with no additional context in a tweet that is at 23.5 million views at the time of writing. This came shortly after a set of outages were reported earlier in the day, with DownDetector showing over 7,400 such instances as of noon EST, with the error message The #TwitterDown hashtag is trending on the platform, and according to reporting by CNN Business, US trends on the platform include “Wtf twitter” and “Thanks Elon.” MrBeast, who recently tweeted at Musk about the prospect of becoming the social media company’s new CEO, responded with “Brb, gonna see how long it takes me to look at 6k posts”.
Brb, gonna see how long it takes me to look at 6k posts
— MrBeast (@MrBeast) July 1, 2023
This is not the first example of temporary outages and disruptions in Twitter’s service since Musk’s takeover and his ensuing decisions to significantly downsize the company’s staff – nor is it the first time that sudden changes have been made to the core user experience. Just yesterday, apparent restrictions were rolled out on accessing the platform and its tweets without an account, with it still being unclear whether this is meant to be an intentional or a permanent change. Similarly, it remains to be seen how long this newly announced temporary limit is going to stick around.
