By Adedapo Adesanya
Twitter woes, which started over the weekend, worsened as the owner set a limit on the number of tweets users can read each day.
Twitter’s owner, Mr Elon Musk, announced the new programme on Saturday as thousands of users reported problems attempting to access the site.
In a tweet on Saturday evening, Mr Musk said that verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day; for unverified accounts, the number drops drastically to 600 posts daily.
Meanwhile, new unverified users can only access 300 posts a day.
In an update, he said rate limits would soon increase to 8,000 for verified users, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified.
Mr Musk said in his original tweet that the change is temporary, noting that it is designed to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation.”
Users reported a “Rate limit exceeded” or “Cannot retrieve tweets” error message and 10,000 people reported issues with Twitter to the website Downdetector.
This is the latest string of problems that users have encountered with the social media app since the billionaire acquired it for $44 billion.
This will be the third time this year that Twitter faced a global outage. In February this year, many global users of Twitter couldn’t operate the basic things on their accounts like tweeting, following someone, and direct messages, among others, while in March 2023, the social media platform experienced glitches in its systems, and many links stopped working suddenly.
Mr Musk noted that Twitter is going through some changes after recently it mandatory to create an account for viewing tweets. This, he called a “temporary emergency measure” will see unregistered individuals attempting to access content on Twitter either create a new account or authenticate themselves with an existing account in order to view their preferred tweets.
