Elon Musk sets reading posts limits on Twitter to prevent data scraping

As millions of users were left in the lurch due to “extreme” backend changes at Twitter, Elon Musk on Saturday said that he has applied temporary limits on who will read how many posts in a day, in order to prevent data scraping and system manipulation.

According to Musk’s new order, verified accounts have been limited to reading 6,000 posts per day.

Musk said that unverified accounts will be able to read 600 posts per day and new unverified accounts just 300 posts a day.

“To address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits,” said the Twitter owner.

His clarification came as millions of users across the globe, including in India, slammed him as micro-blogging platform suffered a major outage globally, which prevented thousands of users from accessing the social media platform.

According to outage monitor website 'Down Detector', more than 7,000 users reported issues with Twitter.

“Someone wake up Elon and tell him his $44 billion app isn't working!” a Twitter user posted.

"Me coming to twitter to see why it says 'rate limit exceeded' #TwitterDown," another user wrote.

The hashtags #TwitterDown and #RateLimitExceeded were trending on Twitter.

Earlier on Saturday, Twitter stopped browsing access on its web platform for people without accounts, as Musk said this drastic action was necessary due to “extreme levels of data scraping”.

“We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users,” Musk posted.

“Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” he claimed.