Twitter has imposed limits on how many tweets users can view each day, with owner Elon Musk claiming the drastic change was needed to fight "data scraping" and other "manipulation." Users who hit the rate limits were greeted with error messages like "Sorry, you are rate limited. Please wait a few moments then try again."
"To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we've applied the following temporary limits: - Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day - New unverified accounts to 300/day," Musk wrote on Saturday.
When Musk says "verified," of course, he means users who pay $8 a month for the Twitter Blue subscription that comes with certain perks, such as adding a blue checkmark to the accounts of subscribers. Prior to Musk's ownership of Twitter, "verified" meant that a user had been confirmed to be notable and authentic.
Musk said later that rate limits would soon rise "to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified." A third Musk tweet on Saturday afternoon suggested that the limits had been raised to 10,000 for Twitter Blue subscribers, 1,000 for most other accounts, and 500 for new accounts that aren't paying for a subscription.
The rate limits were widely mocked by Twitter users all weekend, as trending topics included "#RateLimitExceeded" and "#RIPTwitter." Musk seemed unconcerned, writing, "Oh the irony of hitting view limits due to complaining about view limits."
Massive staff cuts make fixing problems harder
While Musk suggested that he was forced to limit Twitter usage, the extreme staff cuts he's imposed have likely made it harder for Twitter to solve problems without affecting the user experience. Since he bought the social network in October 2022, Musk's cost-cutting has reduced Twitter's staff from about 7,500 to about 1,500.
In March, a single engineer's mistake essentially broke the Twitter API, causing an outage that broke links and other functionality for about an hour. Because of the staff cuts, "every mistake in code and operations is now deadly," one former engineer told The Washington Post in November.
While the latest problems happened shortly after Twitter reportedly stopped paying its bills for Google Cloud services, Twitter already resumed payments to Google before the rate limits were imposed.
In another change, Twitter also now requires people to be logged in to view tweets or profiles. Previously, you could view a tweet or a person's account without logging into a Twitter account. "Temporary emergency measure," Musk wrote on Friday to explain the change. "We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!"
Former Twitter executive Yoel Roth didn't buy Musk's explanation. "It just doesn't pass the sniff test that scraping all of a sudden created such dramatic performance problems that Twitter had no choice but to put everything behind a login," Roth wrote in a post on Twitter rival Bluesky. "Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access. We knew about it. It was fine."
Roth was Twitter's head of trust and safety for seven years before resigning on November 10 over objections to what he called Musk's "dictatorial" leadership style. Roth also commented on Twitter's new policy of charging for API access. "Old management, for all its flaws, recognized that Twitter data was fundamentally public," Roth wrote Saturday. "We could sell access to APIs that made it easier or better to work with—but undermining the publicness of the service to squeeze a little more cash out of the data licensing business was just never practical."
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