Elon Musk May Be to Blame for the "Rate Limited Exceeded" Messages

Ever since Elon Musk purchased the website formerly known as Twitter, it's been a steady downward spiral. The billionaire has removed verified checkmarks in place of a premium subscription, changed the website's name to "X" (despite the URL remaining the same), and implemented a rate limit for users.

Though Twitter has long been a website known for sucking its users into the never-ending doom scroll, some of these changes may now force you to stop looking at your feed and get off the website – or pay a monthly fee. If you've received a notice that your rate limit has been exceeded, here's what it means.

A rate limit is the number of times a user can repeat an action on a website within a certain time frame, limiting the network traffic on the site. You often see this if you've attempted too many times to log into an account that you've forgotten the password for, as it's meant to help prevent bots and other malicious activity from overloading a website. In the case of Twitter, this has been applied to the number of posts you read in a day.

The rate limit was implemented in July, a few months after Elon took over Twitter. He announced the change in a tweet that (ironically) not everyone was able to view because of this new feature.

"To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day, unverified accounts to 600 posts/day, new unverified accounts to 300/day," he tweeted.

Currently, Twitter's premium subscription starts at $3 a month and goes as high as $16 a month. The lowest tier grants you features like editing tweets, tweeting up to 25,000 characters, and more, while the highest tier gets you a blue checkmark and access to the platform's AI Grok. Though plenty have signed up, it's continued to be a topic of controversy among users.

This means that unless you're paying for Twitter's monthly subscription, you can only scroll through so many tweets in a day before you're cut off. Initially, this number was incredibly low and drew backlash from a lot of users. Over time, Elon has increased the number. Though he has not addressed this cap in months, it is estimated that verified users can now see as many as 15,000 posts in one day. It's unclear what the cap is for unverified users currently (or if there still is one).

If you're scrolling through your feed and Twitter tells you you've reached your "rate limit," then it's possible you've scrolled for an incredibly long time and have reached your daily limit of posts you can see.

It's also possible you'll receive this message if you're attempting to send too many tweets or trying to log into a locked account. If you're continuing to have issues with Twitter's rate limit, then it's best to reach out to Twitter support to receive further assistance.