Twitter restricts the number of tweets that free and verified users may see, and there is no access without an account

Twitter is restricting the number of tweets that certain accounts may read every day in order to deter "extreme levels" of data scraping and system manipulation, according to Executive Chair Elon Musk in a statement on the social media network on Saturday.

According to Musk, verified accounts were previously limited to viewing 6,000 posts per day, while unverified users will be limited to 600 posts per day, with new unverified accounts limited to 300.

Musk added in a subsequent post that the temporary reading restriction was then upped to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified users, and 500 posts per day for new unverified users.

Previously, Twitter declared that in order to access tweets, users must have a Twitter account, a decision Musk described on Friday as a "temporary emergency measure."

Musk said that hundreds of organisations, if not thousands, were harvesting Twitter data "extremely aggressively," negatively hurting user experience.

Musk had previously expressed his concern with artificial intelligence startups such as OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for exploiting Twitter data to build big language models.

According to the outage tracking website Downdetector.com, Twitter was offline for thousands of users on Saturday morning.

During the peak of the outage, which occurred around 11:17am ET (8:47 pm IST), about 7,500 users on the social networking site reported difficulties using the app.

The social media site had already made a number of attempts to recoup advertisers who had left Twitter under Musk's control and to increase subscription income by including verification check marks into the Twitter Blue programme.