Elon Musk has joked about Twitter’s temporary daily reading limits after users vented their fury over the site’s new limitations.
“Oh the irony of hitting view limits due to complaining about view limits,” the billionaire tweeted.
Earlier Musk had said Twitter applied the limits to address “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.
He said verified Twitter users were temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day – which was later increased to 8,000 then 10,000.
Meanwhile 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. The figures were later increased to 800 and 400 respectively and then again to 1,000 and 500.
“You awake from a deep trance, step away from the phone to see your friends and family,” Musk joked.
In another post, Musk said: “Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits.”
The announcement 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.
People started reporting problems shortly after noon UK time, according to problem and outage monitoring site Downdetector. By 6pm, the website had received thousands of reports.
“Running Twitter is hard,” co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted. “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 afar…which I’m guilty of…but I know the goal is to see Twitter thrive. It will.”
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.
The billionaire completed a $44bn (£35bn) takeover of the social media site in October 2022, and in April introduced a payment system for “blue ticks”, or verified accounts.
Subscribers are able to post longer tweets and are also able to make changes to published tweets, see about half as many adverts, and use non-fungible token (NFT) profile pictures.
High-profile figures and celebrities said the move leaves the platform open to imposters and disinformation, while Twitter has said the service “elevates quality conversations”.
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Pic: AP
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.
In December, just weeks after the takeover, he tweeted: “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job.”
In May, then NBCUniversal executive Linda Yaccarino was announced as Twitter’s new chief executive, with Musk, 52, saying he would take up the role of executive chairman.
The pledge came after millions of Twitter users asked him to step down in a poll Musk created and promised to abide by.