On Saturday, thousands of individuals reported issues accessing Twitter after owner Elon Musk restricted most users to reading 600 tweets per day — limits he characterised as an effort to prevent unauthorised scraping of potentially valuable data from the platform.
Record some complaints on Downdetector
Based on complaints logged on Downdetector, a website that records internet outages, the crackdown started to have rippling effects early Saturday, forcing more than 7,500 individuals to report issues accessing the social networking account at one time. Although this is a modest proportion of Twitter's more than 200 million global users, the issue was pervasive enough that the hashtag #TwitterDown trended in several areas of the globe.
The outage occurred after Twitter required users to sign in to view tweets and profiles
The outages occurred a day after Twitter began requiring users to log in to view tweets and profiles, a departure from the company's long-standing policy of allowing anyone to peruse the chatter on what Musk has frequently referred to as the world's digital town square since purchasing it for $44 billion last year.
Today's problem is temporary interviews
Musk characterised the new limits in a Friday tweet as a "temporary measure" adopted because "we were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!" Musk expanded on the measures in a Saturday tweet, announcing that unverified users would be restricted to seeing 600 messages per day for the time being, while verified accounts will be allowed to swipe through up to 6,000 posts per day.
After browsing through hundreds of messages, users may be shut out of Twitter for the day as a consequence of the limitations.
Sharp decline in profits
The higher threshold for verified accounts is part of Musk's $8 per month subscription service, which he launched earlier this year in an effort to boost Twitter revenue, which has fallen sharply since he took over the company and laid off roughly three-fourths of the workforce in order to cut costs and avoid bankruptcy.
Advertisers' investment on Twitter has now been reduced, in part due to developments that have allowed for more occasionally cruel and spiky material that offends a larger portion of the service's readership. Musk just appointed Linda Yaccarino, a long-time NBC Universal executive, as Twitter's CEO in a bid to reclaim advertising.
Associated press request
An Associated journalist request regarding Saturday's access issues elicited a vulgar automatic response, which Twitter delivers to the majority of journalist queries without answering the question.
Some people personally tweeted Musk, asking, "Hey Elon, my Twitter isn't working" and "A limit on reading tweets?"
Twitter users saw widespread service interruptions in March, one of the most severe outages since Musk took charge. Over 8,000 customers reported service outages.
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