Elon Musk says Twitter will limit how many tweets users can read

Twitter is limiting how many tweets various accounts can read per day, owner Elon Musk has said, in a bid to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.

Twitter is limiting how many tweets various accounts can read per day, owner Elon Musk has said, in a bid to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.

The restrictions, announced on Friday, began to have ripple effects early on Saturday, causing more than 7,500 people at one point to report problems using the social media service, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks online outages.

Although that’s a relatively small number of Twitter’s more than 200 million worldwide users, the trouble was widespread enough to cause the #TwitterDown hashtag to trend in some parts of the world.

Musk, who bought Twitter for $44bn last year, initially said verified accounts will be limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts will be limited to 600 posts a day.

New unverified accounts are limited to 300 posts a day, he said.

Musk later increased the temporary reading limitation to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for new unverified users.