Twitter Imposes Strict Daily Reading Limits to Combat Data Scraping
Twitter restricts users to reading between 300 and 6,000 posts per day depending on their account status. The sudden limits cause widespread outages and broken feeds across the social network.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk implements strict daily reading limits on the social media platform to combat data scraping and system manipulation. Verified accounts face a cap of 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts and new unverified users are restricted to just 600 and 300 posts respectively. Musk states that these temporary limits will eventually increase to 8,000, 800, and 400 posts per day for the three account tiers.
The sudden restrictions cause immediate chaos across the network, leaving thousands of users with broken home feeds and empty comment threads. The hashtag "#TwitterDown" quickly trends at the top of the platform as frustrated users report widespread outages. The technical difficulties resemble previous high-profile failures on the platform, including a notoriously glitchy Twitter Spaces event with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Web developers and commentators point out that Twitter's technical problems stem from its own recent architectural changes. Experts note that the platform is essentially overwhelming its own servers by continuously requesting content that users are now blocked from viewing, especially following a recent move to hide tweets from logged-out users. This self-inflicted traffic spike creates a cascade of errors that paralyzes the entire system.