Twitter rate limit causes chaos & leaves thousands ‘locked out’ after Elon Musk puts sudden restrictions on all accounts

ELON Musk has announced new restrictions for Twitter users with thousands complaining of being "locked out" after the new rate limit.

The billionaire revealed today he would be temporarily limiting the number of tweets people can read in a day on the popular social media platform.

Mr Musk - who took over Twitter in October after buying it for £35.5 billion- said that verified accounts are being limited to reading 6,000 posts a day.

Unverified accounts can only read 600 posts a day.

Furthermore, new unverified accounts are limited to 300 posts per day

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said Twitter had imposed the "temporary limit" to "address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation".

Musk has previously expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using the platform’s data to train their large language models.

Many logging onto Twitter were met with a message that read "Rate limit exceeded".

#Twitterdown and RIP Twitter began trending as frustrated users were faced with the message.

The change prevented them from seeing new tweets in their feeds, sending out their own tweets, and even sending a DM

In the UK, a peak of 5,126 people complained of problems accessing the site at 4.12pm on Saturday, according to the website - which tracks online outages.

Meanwhile, in the US, some 7,461 people complained of issues as of 4.15pm UK time, the site notes.

In response to Musk's tweet limiting decision, one user satirically said users are now "free" from the addictive app, adding: "See you guys at the park."

But the billionaire quipped that people will now be able to "touch grass again" in response to the tweet rate limit.

However, in spite of the ongoing disruption to usual services, things are now on the up compared to earlier figures.

1,088 users of Twitter in the UK still reported problems at 7.44pm, reports Downdetector.

It's the latest change to the social media platform after Mr Musk faced backlash when he introduced fees for blue ticks in April.

Those who wanted to continue to have an iconic tick would need to fork out up to £11 per month for a Twitter Blue account.

This premium service not only features that tick but users also get other functionality including being able to edit tweets and post longer messages.

Musk also caused controversy for his actions after he initially took over Twitter.

The billionaire immediately slashed hundreds of jobs in a bid to save the company from bankruptcy and fired senior leaders, including former CEO Parag Agrawal.