#TwitterDown: Elon Musk announces temporary read limits on Twitter

Twitter proprietor Elon Musk has restricted the quantity of tweets most customers can view every day — restrictions he described as an try to stop unauthorised scraping of probably beneficial information from the social media platform.

The web site is now requiring folks to go browsing to view tweets and profiles — a change in its longtime observe to permit everybody to peruse the chatter on what Musk has often touted because the world’s digital city sq. since shopping for it for $44 billion final yr.

The restrictions may end in customers being locked out of Twitter for the day after scrolling by a number of hundred tweets. Thousands of customers complained over the weekend of not having the ability to entry the positioning.

An indication at Twitter headquarters is proven in San Francisco on November 18, 2022. (AP)

In a Friday tweet, Musk described the brand new restrictions as a brief measure that was taken as a result of “we were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”

Musk elaborated on the bounds on Saturday, saying unverified accounts will quickly be restricted to studying 600 posts per day, whereas verified accounts will have the ability to scroll by as much as 6,000.

After going through backlash, he tweeted that the thresholds could be raised to 800 posts for unverified accounts and 8000 for verified accounts earlier than later selecting 1000 and 10,000 tweets, respectively.

The crackdown started to have ripple results, inflicting greater than 7500 folks at one level on Saturday (early Sunday AEST) to report issues utilizing the social media service, primarily based on complaints registered on DownDetector, an internet site that tracks on-line outages.

Although that is a comparatively small variety of Twitter’s greater than 200 million worldwide customers, the difficulty was widespread sufficient to trigger the #TwitterDown hashtag to pattern in some components of the world.

The larger threshold allowed on verified accounts is a part of an $US8-per-month ($12) subscription service that Musk rolled out earlier this yr in an effort to spice up Twitter income.

Elon Musk, who owns Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX, speaks on the Vivatech truthful, June 16, 2023, in Paris. (AP)

Advertisers have since curbed their spending on Twitter, partly due to adjustments which have allowed extra sometimes-hateful and prickly content material that offends a wider a part of the service’s viewers.

Musk lately employed longtime NBC Universal govt Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s CEO to attempt to win again advertisers.

An Associated Press inquiry about Saturday’s entry issues triggered a crude automated reply that Twitter sends to most media queries with out addressing the query.