Twitter showing Rate Limit error? Elon Musk says it is all due to a plan

By Divyanshi SharmaEver since Elon Musk assumed role of Twitter’s new owner, the micro-blogging platform has gone through a lot of changes. And Twitter’s latest update has got everyone talking. Some are even predicting that the ‘end’ of the social media site is here. Why? Read on.

On Saturday, Elon Musk’s Twitter showed a Rate Limit error for some users. Thousands of users complained about the outage online, thinking that it was just another day when Twitter had been affected by some bugs. But that was not the case this time around. Musk, after the error was reported, took to Twitter and shared that the microblogging site now has a limit for the number of tweets a user can read in a day.

Elon Musk limits Twitter posts for users

In a tweet, Musk said that Twitter users will be able to see a fixed number of tweets in a day and that the same has been done to “address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”

“To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limitsVerified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day, Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day, New unverified accounts to 300/day,” Musk’s tweet read.

However, the number of posts that users can see in a day has changed twice in the last few hours. In another tweet, Musk wrote that the rate limit will increase to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified and 400 for new unverified accounts soon.

And a couple of hours later, he said that the rate limit would now increase to ‘10,000 (for verified), 1,000 (for unverified) and 500 for new unverified accounts.

Twitter users react

A lot of Twitter users have reacted to the new update and the majority of them aren’t really happy about being restricted to the number of posts that they can see in a day.

Musk, in an attempt to sound funny, tweeted, “Oh the irony of hitting view limits due to complaining about view limits.”

But his tweet didn’t really go down well with Twitter users who were already quite agitated about the decision. “Stop ruining Twitter,” a user wrote while another user added, “Irony of limiting social media so nobody can be social on media.”

“So I’m limited in what I can view, and you also force “suggested” tweets on me, thereby further decreasing those I choose to view? No matter- no one will see this,” yet another user pointed out.

Here are some other reactions

Jack Dorsey defends Twitter

Twitter’s former CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey also gave his two cents about the new update and said that running a platform like Twitter can be quite hard and that he doesn’t wish that ‘stress upon anyone’. He also added that it is easy to criticise from the outside but that he is sure that the Twitter team is working tirelessly under the constraints that they have.

“Running Twitter is hard. I don’t wish that stress upon anyone. I trust that the team is doing their best under the constraints they have, which are immense. It’s easy to critique the decisions from afarâ€æwhich I’m guilty ofâ€æbut I know the goal is to see Twitter thrive. It will,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, Twitter rolled out yet another update recently that prohibits people from viewing the platform’s content unless they are a part of it. This means that if you do not have a Twitter account, you can’t view tweets by celebrities, influential figures, etc, unless you sign up and create an account of your own.