Elon Musk blames AI scraping for Twitter problems

Ongoing issues over the last few days at Twitter Inc., including the introduction of usage limits, have been blamed by owner Elon Musk as a response to artificial intelligence data scraping.

The latest issue at Twitter — there’s rarely a dull moment since Musk took over — emerged on Friday when users started seeing messages such as “rate limit exceeded” and “cannot retrieve tweets.” Users who were not logged into Twitter were also unable to read Tweets and were instead redirected to a signup page.

Musk then took to Twitter to explain that the restrictions were the result of extreme levels of data scraping. “Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data,” Musk said. “It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation.”

To address the alleged issue, Musk then stated that verified accounts would be limited to reading 6,000 posts per day, unverified accounts 600 and new unverified accounts 300 per day. Indicating that perhaps the issue was slowly being dealt with, Musk then increased those limits twice, with the current limits now at 10,000, 1,000 and 500, respectively.

Naturally, Twitter users, prone to complain and whine about even small issues, were unhappy. Trending topics on the site included #TwitterDown, #ratelimitexceeded and #WTFTwitter, among others. As of Sunday evening, however, the Twitter issues were no longer trending, suggesting that either the site had fewer issues or people had given up complaining for the time being.

However, what remains unknown is whether the issue was simply the result of companies scraping the site for artificial intelligence, as Musk suggested, or something else regarding Twitter’s ability to handle increased traffic.

Since taking over Twitter, Musk has cut both staff and cloud services, most notably reportedly refusing to pay Google Cloud bills earlier this month. Twitter had also faced stability issues this year, such as in February when several core features went offline. Embarrassingly for all involved, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis also experienced problems when he launched his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination on Twitter.

One beneficiary of Twitter’s problems is co-founder Jack Dorsey, who has seen his decentralized Twitter rival BlueSky surge in popularity over the last few days. As it turns out, traffic surges are hard to manage, and Bluesky was forced to pause signups due to performance issues.

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