Elon Musk has announced a temporary cap on the number of tweets users can read each day, with verified subscribers getting to see a lot more than those without a blue tick
Unverified accounts – those without a blue tick – were initially limited to reading 600 posts a day, while new unverified accounts were limited to 300 posts a day. These figures were later increased to 800 and 400 respectively and then increased again to 1,000 and 500.
In a second post, Musk joked: “Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits.”
The announcement soon led to RIP Twitter and #Twitterdown trending on the social media site.
Musk, who is also the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, has not said how long the temporary limits will last for.
People started reporting problems shortly after midday UK time, according to problem and outage monitoring site Downdetector. By 6pm, the website had received thousands of reports.
It comes after people trying to access Twitter on Friday were told they would have to be logged into an account to view tweets, in what Musk called a “temporary emergency measure”.
And in February, an outage meant many users were not able to tweet, follow accounts or access their direct messages as the platform was plagued by widespread technical problems.
Since the entrepreneur’s acquisition, Twitter has cut costs dramatically and laid off thousands of employees, including many who had worked on efforts to prevent harmful and illegal content, protect election integrity, and surface accurate information on the site.
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