SAN FRANCISCO — Thousands of people filed complaints on Saturday about problems accessing Twitter after owner Elon Musk limited most users to viewing 600 tweets a day — restrictions they attributed to the unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data from the site. Described as an attempt to stop
The crackdown began taking effect Saturday morning, with more than 7,500 people at one point reporting problems using the social media service, based on complaints lodged on DownDetector, a website that tracks outages online. Although this is a relatively small number of Twitter’s more than 200 million users worldwide, the problem was so widespread that the #TwitterDown hashtag started trending in some parts of the world.
The service disruption occurred a day after Twitter began requiring people to log in to the service to view tweets and profiles – a change to its long-standing practice of allowing everyone to interact on the same content. Which Musk often promotes as the world’s digital. Since buying Town Square last year for $44 billion.
In a Friday tweet, Musk described the new restrictions as a temporary measure that was taken because “so much of our data was being stolen it was degrading service to normal users!” Musk detailed the measures in a Saturday tweet, announcing that unverified accounts would be temporarily limited to reading 600 posts per day, while verified accounts would be able to scroll through up to 6,000 posts per day.
Bans can result in users being locked out of Twitter for a day after scrolling through several hundred tweets.
The higher limit allowed on verified accounts is part of an $8-a-month subscription service that Musk launched earlier this year in an effort to boost Twitter revenue after taking over the company and laying off about three-quarters of its workforce. has fallen rapidly since. To cut costs and avoid bankruptcy.
Advertisers have since curtailed their spending on Twitter, partly because of changes that have allowed sometimes hateful and stinging content that offends a large portion of the service’s audience. Musk recently hired longtime NBC Universal executive Linda Yacarino to become CEO of Twitter in an effort to win back advertisers.
Inquiries from The Associated Press about Saturday’s access problems yielded a crude automated reply that Twitter sends to most press inquiries without addressing the question.
Some users tweeted directly to Musk, saying “Hey Elon, my Twitter is not working” and “Is there a tweet read limit?”
Twitter users faced widespread service disruptions in March, one of the biggest disruptions since Musk took office. More than 8,000 users reported disruption.