Twitter users run into service issues after Elon Musk imposes daily limits on reading tweets

SAN FRANCISCO –

Thousands of individuals logged complaints about issues accessing Twitter on Saturday after proprietor Elon Musk restricted most customers to viewing 600 tweets a day — restrictions he described as an try to stop unauthorized scraping of probably helpful knowledge from the location.

The crackdown started to have ripple results early Saturday, inflicting greater than 7,500 folks at one level to report issues utilizing the social media service, based mostly on complaints registered on Downdetector, a web 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 development in some components of the world.

The service disruptions cropped up a day after Twitter started requiring folks to go browsing to the service so as to view tweets and profiles — a change in its longtime observe to permit all comers to peruse the chatter on what Musk has continuously touted because the world’s digital city sq. since shopping for it for US$44 billion final 12 months.

In a Friday tweet, Musk described the brand new restrictions as a short lived 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 measures in a Saturday tweet that introduced unverified accounts will briefly be restricted to studying 600 posts per day whereas verified accounts will be capable of scroll by as much as 6,000 posts per day.

The restrictions may lead to customers being locked out of Twitter for the day after scrolling by a number of hundred tweets.

The increased threshold allowed on verified accounts is a part of an US$8 per thirty days subscription service that Musk rolled out earlier this 12 months in an effort to spice up Twitter income that has fallen sharply since he took over the corporate and laid off roughly three-fourths of the workforce to cuts prices and stave off chapter.

Advertisers have since curbed their spending on Twitter, partly due to modifications which have allowed extra generally hateful and prickly content material that offends a wider a part of the service’s viewers. Musk not too long ago employed longtime NBC Universal govt Linda Yaccarino to develop into Twitter’s CEO in an effort to win again advertisers.

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