After Twitter owner Elon Musk restricted most users to reading 600 tweets per day, thousands of individuals complained about access issues on Saturday.
Musk explained the limits as an effort to stop illicit scraping of potentially valuable data from the platform.
Based on complaints sent to Downdetector, a website that monitors internet outages, the crackdown started to have an impact early on Saturday, leading more than 7,500 individuals at one time to report issues using the social networking service.
Even if that represents a small portion of Twitter’s more than 200 million users globally, the issue was significant enough to make the hashtag #TwitterDown popular in several regions of the world.
The outages occurred a day after Twitter changed its long-standing policy of allowing anyone to browse the conversation on what Musk has frequently referred to as the world’s digital town square since purchasing it for $44 billion last year.
Previously, viewing tweets and profiles required logging into the service. Musk explained the new limitations as a temporary measure that was implemented because “we were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users! “, he wrote in a tweet on Friday.
Musk clarified the measures in a tweet on Saturday, noting that confirmed users will initially be allowed to browse through up to 1,200 posts each day, while unverified accounts will only be able to see 600.
After browsing through several hundred messages, users can be shut off from Twitter for the day as a result of the limitations.
The increased threshold permitted for verified accounts is a component of an $8 monthly subscription service that Musk launched earlier this year in an effort to increase Twitter revenue, which has fallen precipitously since he took over the company and fired roughly three-fourths of the workforce to reduce costs and avoid bankruptcy.
Since then, advertisers have reduced their expenditure on Twitter in part because of developments that have made it possible for more abusive and venomous information to be posted, which offends a larger segment of the service’s user base.
In a move to regain advertisers, Musk most recently selected former NBC Universal executive Linda Yaccarino to lead Twitter.
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