On 1 July, Twitter owner Elon Musk imposed limits on viewing tweets: new users can view 500 posts per day, older users 1,000, and Twitter Blue subscribers 10,000.
According to the tycoon, the move is temporary and tied to an ‘extreme level’ of data parsing and manipulation of the system. He did not specify when the limits would be lifted, but allowed for an increase in the near future.
Meanwhile, in the platform’s technical documentation it still states that “tweets are public by default” and “anyone can view private posts and interact with them”.
Meanwhile, ordinary users began encountering a number of problems, including an unresponsive feed and the comments function. And the hashtag #TwitterDown (“Twitter is down”) has become one of the most popular in recent days.
“Is there any point to this app now?” — asked himself one of the users.
There is speculation that Musk’s move is aimed at curbing AI language models that train on publicly available data from social networks such as Twitter.
Another potential reason for the viewing limits could be strained relations with Google. Earlier Bloomberg reported that the platform stopped paying for the cloud services of the company. It used them for data analysis and machine learning. Industry estimates put pre‑Musk expenditure on such services at around $200‑300 million.
There is chatter in the community that Twitter’s technical problems relate to its weak software architecture. According to the developer of the competing decentralized platform Mastodon, Sheldon Chen, Musk’s network “is inviting a DDoS attack on itself”.
He noted that Twitter was unavailable all morning after the update. Chen attempted to push through the persistent errors and wait for the load to improve, but the site kept issuing repeated requests.
“Twitter sends itself about 10 requests per second to try to fetch content that never loads, because Elon Musk’s latest brilliant innovation blocked people’s ability to read tweets without signing in. This probably created horrific conditions that developers never anticipated, and thus we got this comic sequence of errors, triggering the most epic DDoS attack on themselves,” the developer explained.
Reddit is also facing internal difficulties — more than 6,000 communities shut down in protest against the company’s monetization policy towards developers. The platform’s leadership said it would begin charging third-party apps for using the API.
Chief executive Steve Huffman told The New York Times that the move was partly motivated by a desire to curb AI companies.
“We do not necessarily have to give away all the value of the data for free to some of the world’s largest companies,” he noted.
The previous billionaire’s attempt to rid Twitter of bots via an $8-a-month paid subscription did not yield significant results. A study by dappGambl found that around 10% of followers of popular cryptocurrency accounts remain fake.
According to the Dewey Square Group, with the arrival of the new CEO Twitter has shown a monthly outflow of users. In March, traffic to the social network fell 7.7% year on year.
Meanwhile, competitors report a surge in new accounts and even outages. Cohost representatives said servers were overwhelmed due to an “unprecedented number of sign-ups”.
The decentralized social network BlueSky, led by former Twitter chief Jack Dorsey, has had to suspend new user registrations amid performance issues.
Just before the restrictions, Spill—a microblogging platform also created by former Twitter employees—launched a beta version of the app in the App Store.
In April 2022, Musk became the largest shareholder of Twitter after acquiring 9.2% of the shares for $2.89 billion. Later he proposed to buy the social network for $43 billion, to create “an inclusive arena for freedom of speech”.
The $44 billion deal closed in October. The former CEO Parag Agrawal and its CFO Ned Segal left Twitter’s headquarters.
In May 2023, Musk said that he had found a replacement as chief executive of Twitter. The new CEO was former NBCUniversal advertising chief Linda Yaccarino.