In response to unprecedented system manipulation and data scraping, Twitter is temporarily constraining the number of posts users can view daily. Twitter’s executive chairman, Elon Musk, detailed the restrictions on July 1, setting the daily limit at 10,000 posts for verified users, with unverified and recently created unverified accounts allowed 1,000 and 500 posts, respectively.

Twitter’s recent performance problems have been apparent, with users experiencing issues such as unavailable tweets, absent timelines, and encountering a “rate limited exceeded” message. The trending hashtags #TwitterDown and #TwitterFail underscored these concerns in certain areas. Over the past day, Downdetector, a real-time outage monitor, has registered thousands of user reports on Twitter outages.

Geographical analysis by “Is The Service Down” indicates that France, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the coastal regions of the United States are experiencing the most significant impacts.

Musk didn’t pinpoint the source of Twitter’s data scraping or delve into the specifics of the “system manipulation” assertion, but he did mention that the overwhelming data pillaging was adversely affecting user experience. Some experts believe that AI chatbots capable of web browsing, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, could be causing the excessive “data scraping.”

According to Twitter’s technical documentation, these rate limits aim to regulate the traffic to Twitter’s Application Programming Interface (API). It states that such limits are vital in maintaining a reliable and scalable API to serve the needs of their developer community.

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and previous CEO of Twitter, defended the recent measures in a July 2 post, expressing that managing Twitter was a complex task and the new regulations were likely implemented for the platform’s overall benefit. He conveyed his desire to see Twitter adopt a “genuinely censorship-resistant open protocol” comparable to Bitcoin and Nostr.

Meanwhile, on a lighter note, it appears that Elon Musk is gearing up for a possible MMA match against fellow billionaire and Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, outside his professional commitments.