It was a chaotic weekend on Twitter.
It started with sudden changes in who could see tweets, followed by sudden changes in how many tweets users could see, and even times when many users couldn’t see any tweets at all.
A new error message, “Speed limit exceeded,” confused many Twitter users seeing it for the first time. When Elon Musk announced that the platform was temporarily limiting the number of tweets users could see, he raised more questions than answers.
By Monday morning, most of the website’s issues seemed to have been resolved. However, it was not clear what people could expect from the platform. Several users Twitter dashboard app TweetDeck, a tool that allows users to monitor multiple Twitter timelines and profiles simultaneously in side-by-side columns, reported that they were unable to load tweets.
It was also not clear how the changes may affect Twitter’s visibility outside of its platform. Google seemed to no longer show tweets at the top of some search results.
“We are aware that our ability to crawl twitter.com has been limited, which affects our ability to display tweets and site pages in search results,” a Google spokesperson said. “Websites have control over whether crawlers can access their content.”
It was at least the second time this year that major changes to Twitter coincided with technical problems. In March, several features of Twitter crashed after the company made changes to its application programming interface, which allows developers to create programs that can interact with the platform.
Chaos is something Twitter users expect under Musk, but it was the first major problem under new CEO Linda Yaccarino.
Yaccarino, who replaced Musk in June and previously served as president of advertising sales at NBCUniversal, expects retrieve advertisers who fled Twitter after the Musk acquisition. She hasn’t publicly commented on the weekend outages, but she did like some of Musk’s tweets, including one in which he wrote: “The reason I set a ‘View Limit’ is because we’re all Twitter addicts.” and we need to get out. I’m doing a good deed for the world here. Also, that’s another view you just used.”
Musk still owns Twitter and now holds the title of the company’s chief technology officer.
The changes began Friday, when Musk said tweets would be temporarily unavailable to people without an account. Previously, a link to a single tweet could be viewed in a web browser without logging in.
On Saturday, Musk said that unverified users would only be able to read 600 tweets a day. He then changed the figure several times. More recently, according to muskverified users can see up to 10,000 posts per day, unverified users can see 1,000 posts per day, and new users can see 500 posts per day.
Around the same time, Twitter users began reporting problems accessing the platform’s main service and found the message “Speed limit exceeded” instead of the endless stream of tweets they expected. Thousands of users reported problems loading content on Twitter.
Twitter responded to a request for comment on how long the restrictions would be in place with an automated email from a poop emoji.
Some former employees questioned Musk’s stated reason for the restrictions, to limit the ability of data trackers to gather information from Twitter’s platform.
According to Musk, companies “from startups to some of the largest corporations on Earth” have been scraping Twitter’s platform for free data to use in developing AI tools. Data scraping refers to the automated activity that collects large amounts of data from websites.
Yoel Roth, a former Twitter security chief who resigned shortly after Musk’s inauguration, posted his own theory about the flaws.
“For anyone in the know, this isn’t even the first time they’ve completely broken the site by tampering with the speed limiter,” Roth posted in blue sky, a Twitter alternative largely funded by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. “There’s a reason the limiter was one of the most locked-in internal tools. Messing with frequency caps is probably the easiest way to break Twitter.”
According to Roth at Bluesky, “It just doesn’t pass the detection test that scraping suddenly created such dramatic performance problems that Twitter had no choice but to put everything behind one login.”
“Scraping was the open secret to Twitter data access,” Roth wrote. “We knew it. It was ok.”
kevin collier contributed.
