In a tweet Musk said that verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day.
Thousands of Twitter users reported problems attempting to access the social media site on July 1, 2023 (Saturday). This was followed by Elon Musk's tweet which said that he will be limiting daily number of tweets users can read.
In a tweet Musk said that verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day. For unverified accounts, the number drops drastically to 600 posts a day. New unverified users can only access 300 posts a day.
In an update, he added that rate limits would soon increase to 8,000 for verified users, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified. About three hours later, Musk tweeted, "Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k."
Musk said in his original tweet that the change is temporary and was put in place to 'address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation'. It's the latest widespread outage since he acquired the social media site late last year.
Many users who tried to access or post content on Twitter’s website or mobile app were met with a “Rate limit exceeded” or “Cannot retrieve tweets” error message.
Around 11 a.m. ET, more than 7,300 people reported issues with Twitter to the website Downdetector. That number had dropped into the 600s by Saturday night, as per CNBC.
Saturday’s outage is not the first time Twitter has suffered technical difficulties in recent months. In February, users were unable to post on the site for about 90 minutes after receiving a message that read, “You are over the daily limit for sending Tweets.” In March, users were temporarily unable to click on links or load images.
Twitter keeps bleeding advertisers. Just after the takeover of the microblogging site by Elon Musk, a report by Pathmatics, a marketing platform, found that the ad revenue contribution by Twitter’s top 10 advertisers has reduced by 89 per cent since October 2022.
According to estimates by Pathmatics, from September to October last year, the top 10 advertisers on Twitter spent $71 million on ads. In the past two months that figure dropped to just $7.6 million, a decline of 89 per cent, said the research firm. Twitter’s top ad customers have historically included marquee names such as HBO, Amazon, IBM and Coca-Cola.
While this change is temporary as per the latest tweet, but how will it affect ad revenue?