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Twitter outage: Elon Musk sets temporary reading limits on microblogging site to ‘prevent data scraping’


Twitter CEO Elon Musk said on Saturday that the microblogging platform has applied ‘temporary limits’ amid users complaining of an outage. Users said they saw ‘cannot retrieve tweets’ and ‘rate limit exceeded’ error messages on their timelines.

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

Musk added that verified accounts on the platform are limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts can read 600 posts per day. He added that new verified accounts can read 300 daily posts.

According to Down Detector, a website that tracks online service disruptions, around 500 reports related to the issues with Twitter were reported around 9 PM.

The latest outage comes after a major glitch on Twitter in March when users were unable to log in on the platform. The Musk-owned social media site also faced a similar incident earlier in February.

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Twitter will now require users to have an account on the social media platform to view tweets.On Friday, Musk called the move a “temporary emergency measure”.

“We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk said in a tweet.

The microblogging site has faced outages frequently since Musk took over the company in November last year and started cutting its workforce. After reducing over 50% of its roughly 7,500 employees, Musk initiated another round of layoffs earlier this year, sacking 200 employees.

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Twitter also suffered a major outage in December last year, leaving thousands of users globally unable to access the platform or use its key features.

During the outage, some users were unable to log in to their Twitter account via desktops or laptops. The issue also affected the mobile app and features including notifications. Following the reports, Musk tweeted he was still able to use the service.

“Works for me,” Musk tweeted in response to a user who asked if Twitter was broken.

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