Twitter is applying a temporary limit on the number of tweets users can read in a day, owner Elon Musk said.
on a tweet to himselfMr Musk said unverified accounts are now limited to reading 600 posts a day.
For new unverified accounts, the number is 300. Meanwhile, accounts with “verified” status are limited to 6,000 posts per day.
Mr Musk said the temporary limits were to address “severe levels of data scraping and system manipulation”.
Data scraping refers to a process that sees information taken from a website and imported into another program. Mr Musk did not provide further details, or explain what the manipulation of the system means in this context.
Mr. Musk later added that reading limits will “soon” increase to 800 tweets per day for unverified accounts, 400 for new unverified accounts and 8,000 for verified accounts.
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 at the time.
He claimed that the social media platform “takes data theft which is a very harmful service for normal users”.
According to the website Downdetector – which tracks online outages – a peak of 5,126 people reported problems accessing the platform in the UK at 16:12 BST on Saturday.
In the US, about 7,461 people reported glitches at the same time.
Signified by a blue check, the “verified” status was given for free by Twitter to high-profile accounts before Mr Musk took over as its boss.
Now, most users have to pay a subscription fee from $8 (£6.30) per month to be verified, and can get the status regardless of their profile.
Some high-profile accounts have a verification badge despite not paying for it, although many temporarily lost their blue tick badges in April.
Mr Musk bought the company last year for $44bn (£35bn) after much back and forth. He criticized Twitter’s previous management and said he did not want the platform to become an echo chamber.
Shortly after taking over, he cut the workforce from just under 8,000 employees to about 1,500.
In an interview with the BBC, he said that cutting workers is not easy.
Engineers were included in the layoffs and their exit raised concerns about the stability of the platform.
But while Mr Musk acknowledged some glitches, he told the BBC in April that the outages were short-lived and the site was working fine.