Elon Musk’s Twitter 2.0 seems to be going well. As July started, a lot of users found Twitter unable to load, with many reporting an error message which said that the user had reached their “rate limit.” Musk later announced that Twitter had started rate-limiting users in an apparent attempt to prevent “data scraping.”
The initial limits seem to have been revised multiple times since then, but Twitter’s rate limiting still seems to be active. Twitter Blue subscribers also seem to be rate limited, although not as badly as non-paying users.
Twitter begins limiting access to the platform
To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day- New unverified accounts to 300/dayJuly 1, 2023
The rate limit began at 6000 posts per day for verified accounts, 600 posts a day for unverified accounts, and 300 posts a day for new unverified accounts. Musk then announced they had changed the limits to 8,000, 800, and 400, and again to 10,000, 1,000, and 500.
There has been a lot of discourse over this, mostly blasting this decision to limit Twitter usage. Twitter has famously had an issue turning revenue through advertising, and many users were quick to point out that limiting usage isn’t great for advertising.
There are also theories about how this is related to Twitter’s pending Google Cloud fees. Apparently, the contract was due for renewal on June 30th, and some industry experts have said that this new policy could be a result of Twitter’s usage getting throttled.
Another issue seemed to be that by imposing this rate limit, Twitter had accidentally started a self-DDoS, where the site was sending repeated requests to load data that it itself had limited, leading to the site DDoS-ing itself.
Behold, Elon has created the self DDoS. pic.twitter.com/7v7uAAe2dCJuly 1, 2023
There are a whole lot of other inconsistencies as well, with the limits not working in the same manner for every user. Users have already begun figuring out ways to bypass it as well. Regardless, it seems like Twitter is going to become tougher to use in the coming days.