Twitter is temporarily restricted. We explain why 🐦

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Over the weekend, many Twitter users experienced problems accessing publications on the platform. Elon Musk was quick to respond with an explanation for the problems. But what is really going on?

« Rate limit exceeded »: when Twitter users are limited⚠️

Twitter users were faced with a frustrating situation last weekend. While browsing through their usual stream of tweets, a mysterious message appeared: « Rate limit exceeded ». This message asked users to wait a moment before trying again.

Le message de la discorde sur Twitter

Elon Musk a rapidement répondu en donnant les raisons de l’apparition de ce nouveau message.

According to the Twitter owner, the platform has been faced with an excessive number of requests, an extreme level of data recovery and system manipulation. He is convinced that start-ups specialising in artificial intelligence are responsible for these problems. He accuses them of overloading Twitter’s servers in order to collect data that will be used to train their own artificial intelligence systems. To solve this problem, it has decided to restrict access to this data, with limitations depending on the type of account:

• Verified accounts: 6,000 publications per day
• Unverified accounts: 600 publications per day
• New unverified accounts: 300 posts per day

Although these restrictions were temporary, they quickly rendered the platform virtually useless and difficult to use. What’s more, this incident occurred shortly after Twitter decided to block access to tweets for offline users.

Is it really the fault of AI startups? 🤖

Dion Almaer sur Twitter

What about alternatives?🤔

Others have tried their luck with the local social network, Dikalo. The application is available on the web and on Android. Unfortunately, the application is still in beta on iOS and is only available via TestFlight. What’s more, it has a number of bugs associated with its youth.

Finally, more and more information suggests that a competitor created by Meta is about to be launched. After the first leaks (which you can discover by clicking here), the application apparently called ‘Threads’ briefly appeared on the Google Play Store.

Application Threads de Meta