Twitter has limited the number of posts users can read daily; here's why

Elon Musk, who bought Twitter last year, announced that the platform would temporarily limit the amount of posts that users could read daily.

Verified Twitter accounts were limited to reading 6,000 posts each day, while unverified accounts could read 600 posts per day and new unverified accounts could read 300 a day. The limitations were put in place to address "extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation," Musk said in a tweet Saturday afternoon. 

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Musk bumped up the tweet limit multiple times throughout the day. By the evening, he had increased the limits to "10k, 1k & 0.5k."

The announcement came after an outage that began early Saturday morning, which caused thousands of Twitter users to report they were unable to use the app. On Friday, Musk expressed concerns over hundreds of organizations "scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively," which was affecting user experience.

Since Musk took over in October and eliminated much of the company's work force, Twitter has generally become less stable and malfunctions have become more frequent. In March, more than 8,000 users reported disruptions, one of the largest outages since Musk took over. 

Twitter's advertising revenue from April 1 to early May was down 59 percent compared to last year, the New York Times reported. Many users are looking to migrate to similar social media platforms, like Mastodon and Bluesky, and Meta is reportedly working on its own text-based app to rival Twitter.

Musk did not say how long the temporary limits would last or what would lead to lifting the restrictions. But he did take to Twitter to comment on the tweet limits leading to more time spent with friends and family, and that his post about the limitations ironically received a record view count.

Twitter users had many thoughts on the temporary tweet limits, ranging from jokes to serious concerns over sharing vital information.