Elon Musk Announces New Twitter Limits: On Saturday, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, announced a limitation on the number of tweets users can read daily, following reports of difficulties accessing Twitter.
In a tweet, Musk stated that verified accounts can read up to 6,000 posts per day, while unverified accounts have a significantly lower limit of 600 posts per day. New unverified users are restricted to accessing only 300 posts daily.
Musk clarified that this change is temporary and aims to tackle issues related to excessive data scraping and system manipulation. This move comes amid a series of widespread outages since Musk acquired the social media platform in late 2022.
Twitter Rate Limit Exceeded: Elon Musk Announces New Twitter Limits
Numerous users encountered error messages such as “Rate limit exceeded” or “Cannot retrieve tweets” when attempting to access or post content on Twitter’s website or mobile app. Downdetector, a website that monitors service outages, received over 7,300 reports of issues with Twitter by 11 a.m. ET.
This outage is not the first time Twitter has faced technical difficulties in recent months. In February, users were unable to post on the site for around 90 minutes due to exceeding the daily tweet limit. In March, users experienced temporary issues with clicking on links and loading images.
Previous outages coincided with reports of a data center closure and significant layoffs at Twitter, which Musk asserted were necessary for the company’s financial well-being.
Why have limits?
Limits alleviate some of the strain on the behind-the-scenes part of Twitter and reduce downtime and error pages. For the sake of reliability, we’ve placed some limits on the account actions below.
List of all current Twitter limits
The current technical limits for accounts are:
- Tweets: 2,400 per day. The daily update limit is further broken down into smaller limits for semi-hourly intervals. Retweets are counted as Tweets.
- Direct Messages (daily): The limit is 500 messages sent per day.
- Following (account-based): Once an account is following 5,000 other accounts, additional follow attempts are limited by account-specific ratios.
- Following (daily): The technical follow limit is 400 per day. Please note that this is a technical account limit only, and there are additional rules prohibiting aggressive following behavior.
- Changes to account email: 4 per hour.
These limits include actions from all devices, including web, mobile, phone, API, etc. API requests from all third-party applications are tracked against the hourly API limit. People who use multiple third-party applications with their account will therefore reach the API limit more quickly.
These limits may be temporarily reduced during periods of heavy site usage. In such cases, we will post an update on the Twitter status site.
What happens if I hit a limit?
If you do reach a limit, we’ll let you know with an error message telling you which limit you’ve hit. For limits that are time-based (like the Direct Messages, Tweets, changes to account email, and API request limits), you’ll be able to try again after the time limit has elapsed.
The Tweet limit of 2,400 updates per day is further broken down into semi-hourly intervals. If you hit your account update/Tweet limit, please try again in a few hours after the limit period has elapsed.
