Elon Musk, the Executive Chairman, revealed that Twitter is imposing temporary limits on the number of posts users can read each day due to the occurrence of "extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation." In a post on July 1, Musk stated that verified accounts would be limited to 10,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts and new unverified accounts would be restricted to 1,000 posts per day and 500 posts per day, respectively. Twitter users have been experiencing issues on the p platform, such as missing tweets, disrupted timelines, and "rate limit exceeded" messages, leading to the hashtags #TwitterDown and #TwitterFail trending in some areas.
Reports from the real-time outage monitoring site DownDetector indicate a significant number of user-submitted reports of Twitter outages within the past 24 hours. Countries heavily affected by these outages include France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the eastern and western coast s of the United States. While Musk did not provide specific details about the data theft that occurred on Twitter or the exact nature of the "system manipulation," he mentioned that the data was "looted" to such an extent that it impacted the availability of services .
There is speculation that the extensive "data scraping" may be attributed to AI chatbots that facilitate web browsing, such as OpenAI's GPT-4. Twitter's developer documentation states that rate limits are in place to manage the volume of requests made to the Twitter application programming interface (API). These limits ensure the reliability and scalability of the API, which is essential for the developer community. In a tweet on July 2, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey defended the recent decision, acknowledging the challenges of running. Twitter and suggesting that it was made for the greater good of the platform.
Dorsey also expressed his desire to see Twitter adopt "truly censorship-resistant open protocols" like Bitcoin and Nostr. Meanwhile, outside of the Twitter sphere, Elon Musk seemed to be preparing for a potential mixed martial arts cage fight with Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire CEO of Meta.
