To prevent “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation, Twitter is limiting the number of tweets that different accounts can read each day, according to Executive Chair Elon Musk in a post on the social networking site on Saturday.
According to Musk, unverified accounts would be limited to viewing 300 posts per day with new unverified accounts being limited to 600 posts per day. Verified accounts were initially restricted to reading 6,000 posts per day.
The temporary reading limitation was later increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for new unverified users, Musk said in a separate post without providing further details.
Previously, Twitter had announced it will require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets, a move that Musk on Friday called a “temporary emergency measure.”
Musk had said that hundreds of organizations or more were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, impacting user experience.
Musk had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.
Twitter was down for thousands of users on Saturday morning, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
Nearly 7,500 users across the social media platform reported issues with accessing the app during the peak of the outage at around 11:17 AM ET.
The social media platform had previously taken a number of steps to win back advertisers who left Twitter under Musk’s ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification check marks a part of the Twitter Blue program.