Since this Saturday morning, July 1, 2023, Elon Musk has implemented new limitations for Twitter. The social network becomes almost inaccessible in its free version.
Officially to thwart misuse of the social network, but more likely to push people once again to subscribe to Twitter Blue, Elon Musk has unilaterally implemented a new restriction on his social network.
“Rate Limit Exceeded”
Since this Saturday morning, July 1, 2023, Twitter users have gradually discovered the message “Rate limit exceeded” suggesting that an update to the social network had largely restricted its use. This comes as Twitter recently blocked access to tweets from its website if one is not logged into an account. The social network thus joins the practices of LinkedIn or Facebook in this area.
It is still possible to access notifications and respond to private messages or mentions, but viewing your feed becomes impossible. The problem is present both on the website and on the official applications.
Elon Musk announces limitations
Elon Musk posted a tweet on July 1 at 7:00 p.m. PT explaining the issue. In fact, this tweet is ironically inaccessible to many users who are victims of the new version of the social network. We learn that the businessman wants to limit access to Twitter data that would be collected by external actors in an “extreme” way.
To counteract this, he announces that accounts now have a restricted number of daily tweet views.
- New accounts: 300 tweets posted per day
- free Twitter accounts: 600 tweets posted per day
- Blue “verified” paid Twitter accounts: 6,000 tweets posted per day
Posting 600 messages on a social network known for its very brief posts can go very quickly. Fortunately, Elon Musk promises that the measure is temporary. Still, the social network seems to be closing in on itself while its success has been built on its virality. Twitter is arguably the most important social platform in the world, whether we use it or not.
A bug or an unpaid invoice?
It’s hard to know if Elon Musk is telling the truth about the reason for the new Twitter limitations. Some Internet users have made the connection between the date of July 1 and the expiry on June 30 of a large contract with Google Cloud for part of the hosting of the platform. It was disclosed by Platform in early June: Twitter reportedly refused to pay the bill and tried to renegotiate with Google since March.
Other netizens are linking to the recent update that prevents reading tweets without being logged into an account. This change would have led to use cases that Twitter engineers had not imagined, before being fired by Elon Musk. As a result, using Twitter would somehow cause an automatic DDOS attack.
Competitors rub their hands
For several months, other actors have been trying in vain to pose as an alternative. Meta is said to be working on a new function for Instagram that looks a lot like Twitter.
The young social network Bluesky, a competitor of Twitter in closed beta, announced that its servers were saturated due to record traffic.
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