Twitter has temporarily engaged a couple of measures to limit access in an effort to combat data scraping.

Twitter has been a popular source of data for companies training generative AI models, something that owner Elon Musk has railed against. The company has enacted temporary measures to combat this, including limiting web access unless a person is signed in, as well as limiting the number of posts per day registered accounts can access.

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:

• Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
• Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
• New unverified accounts to 300/day

Elon Musk (@elonmusk) — July 1, 2023

Musk later tweeted that the limits are being increased:

Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified

Elon Musk (@elonmusk) — July 1, 2023

Interestingly, Downdetector.com registered a major spike in reports of a Twitter outage, but many of these reports were probably the result of the above limits.