On Saturday, a significant number of individuals filed complaints regarding difficulties accessing Twitter.

This issue arose after the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, implemented restrictions that limited most users to viewing only 600 tweets per day.

Musk claimed that these limitations were implemented to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data from the site, the Associated Press reported.

The impact of these measures quickly spread on Saturday, with over 7,500 people at one point reporting problems with the social media service, as recorded on Downdetector, a website that monitors online outages.

While this number may be relatively small compared to Twitter’s worldwide user base of over 200 million, the disruptions were widespread enough to make the hashtag #TwitterDown trend in certain regions.

These service disruptions emerged a day after Twitter introduced a new requirement for users to log in to the platform in order to view tweets and profiles.

This change departed from the platform’s previous practice of allowing unrestricted access to its content, which Elon Musk has often referred to as the world’s digital town square since his acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion last year.

In a Friday tweet, Musk explained that the new restrictions were a temporary measure implemented because “we were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”

Musk further elaborated on the restrictions in a Saturday tweet, stating that unverified accounts would be temporarily limited to reading 600 posts per day, while verified accounts could scroll through up to 6,000 posts per day, as reported by the AP.

As a result of these restrictions, users may find themselves locked out of Twitter for the day after browsing through several hundred tweets.

Written by staff