July 1 (UPI) — Elon Musk, the controversial billionaire owner of Twitter, said Saturday that the social media giant has imposed “temporary” limits on the number of tweets accounts can read.
Musk said in a tweet that the limitations were put into place “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”
Verified accounts are now limited to reading 6,000 posts per day while unverified accounts are limited to reading 600 posts per day and new accounts that are created and unverified will be limited to reading 300 posts per day.
Musk later added that the rate limits would soon increase to 8,000 for verified users, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified.
It was not immediately clear how long Musk intends to keep the rate limits in place.
More than 7,400 people had reported having issues with the platform as of Saturday morning, according to Downdetector.com.
Some Twitter users who reported outages to Downdetector speculated the outages and rate limits are a ploy to get people to buy Twitter Blue subscriptions.
Twitter responded to an email request from UPI seeking additional information with a poop emoji.
