Twitter Implements Temporary Post Limit

Twitter is temporarily limiting the number of posts that users can read per day due to “extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation,” according to Elon Musk, Twitter’s executive chairman.

In certain jurisdictions, the hashtags #TwitterDown and #TwitterFail trended as a result of Twitter users reporting issues such as the inability to retrieve tweets, missing timelines, and a “rate limit exceeded” message.

Downdetector has received thousands of user-submitted reports of Twitter outages over the past twenty-four hours.

According to Is The Service Down France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the East and West Coasts of the United States appear to be the most affected regions.

Musk did not clarify what may be responsible for scraping Twitter’s data or elaborate on the root cause of the “system manipulation” claim.

Still, he did state that their data was being “pillaged” to such an extent that it degraded the service for users.

Some believe that web-browsing-enabled artificial intelligence chatbots, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, are responsible for the extreme “data scraping.”

According to Twitter’s developer documentation, Twitter’s Application Programming Interface (API) imposes rate limits to manage the volume of API requests.

The document states, “These limits enable us to provide a dependable and scalable API on which our developer community can rely.”

In a July 2 post, Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, was one of the few to defend the recent changes, stating that “Running Twitter is hard” and that the decision was likely made for the greater good of the platform.

He would like to see Twitter adopt a “truly censorship-resistant open protocol” similar to Bitcoin and Nostr.

Musk appears to be training outside the office for a possible mixed martial arts cage match with fellow billionaire and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.