Why are Twitter users seeing ‘rate limit exceeded’ and what does it mean?

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter continues to be a bit of a mixed bag, and his latest update is unlikely to go down well.

Tweeting on Saturday evening, he announced users would have a temporary limit placed on the number of tweets they could view in a day.

Verified accounts are limited to 6,000 posts a day. Unverified accounts can only read 600 posts a day, with new unverified accounts limited to just 300.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said Twitter had imposed the ‘temporary limit’ to ‘address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation’.

Mr Musk, who bought the platform for $44 billion last year, has said hundreds of organisations or more were scraping Twitter data ‘extremely aggressively’, impacting user experience.

He has previously expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using the platform’s data to train their large language models.

Users are seeing a message saying ‘rate limit exceeded’, and it’s preventing them from seeing new tweets in their feeds, sending out their own tweets, and even sending a DM (direct message).

#Twitterdown, #RateLimitExceeded and RIP Twitter began trending as frustrated users were faced with the latest change.

Earlier this week many users found their ability to like, follow or reTweet suspended for three days after supposedly ‘violating the site’s rules’, which was quickly uncovered as another bug on the platform.

What does ‘rate limit exceeded’ mean on Twitter?

For now, it means users will only be able to scroll so far before they hit their daily limit.

Verified accounts, including those who subscribe to Twitter Blue, will be able to view 6,000 posts.

Existing unverified accounts will hit the limit after 600, and new unverified accounts will only be able to view 300.

However, in a tweet posted shortly after the announcement Mr Musk said the rates would soon increase to 8,000, 800 and 400 respectively.

Mr Musk said on Twitter that the update was a ‘temporary measure’, but has not specified how long it may last for.

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