Twitter users report outages as site caps post people can view

Thousands of people had problems accessing Twitter or dealt with other service issues on the social media platform Saturday. 

The outages began cropping up Saturday morning in the wake of owner Elon Musk implementing new restrictions on how many tweets users could view, with most of its 200 million users capped at 600 daily. 

At one point, nearly 7,500 people were reporting problems with the platform, according to DownDetector, which tracks websites’ outages. 

Throughout the day, hashtags including #TwitterDown and #RateLimitExceed were trending topics, as was BlueSky, a decentralized social media platform co-founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.  

The technical difficulties came the day after Musk announced people would be required to have a Twitter account to view tweets — a dramatic break from a model that has allowed anyone to peruse what was effectively the internet’s water cooler. 

Musk described the move as a “temporary emergency measure,” blaming the drastic shift on hundreds of organizations scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively” and affecting users’ experience. 

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

Musk announced Tuesday afternoon that verified accounts had been temporarily limited to viewing 6,000 posts a day, with unverified limited to 600 posts daily and new unverified accounts limited to 300.

Musk announced cap increases multiple times throughout the day, eventually reaching 10,000, 1,000 and 500, respectively, just before 6 p.m.

The social media platform has also has sought to boost subscription revenue by folding verification check into the Twitter Blue program.

With Post wires.