Twitter has applied a temporary limit to the number of tweets users can read in a day, owner Elon Musk has said.
In a tweet, Mr Musk said unverified accounts can read up to 600 posts a day.
Verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, while newly unverified accounts can only see 300 posts per day, he added.
Mr Musk said the temporary limits were to address “extreme levels” of data scrapping and system manipulation.
On Friday, those trying to access Twitter were told they had to login to view the content. The move was a “temporary emergency measure”, Mr Musk said.
He claimed that the social media platform was “getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users”.
According to the website Downdetector – which tracks online outages – in the UK a peak of 5,126 people reported problems accessing the platform at 16:12 BST.
Mr Musk bought the company last year for $44bn (£35bn) after much back and forth. Soon after taking over, he decided to cut the workforce from just under 8,000 staff to about 1,500.
In an interview with the BBC, he said that cutting the workforce had not been easy.
Engineers were included in the layoffs and their exit raised concerns about the platform’s stability.
But while Mr Musk acknowledged some glitches, he told the BBC in April that outages had not lasted very long and the site was working fine.
Watch: Elon Musk’s unexpected BBC interview… in 90 seconds
