The social media company has started blocking users who are not registered

Twitter’s Failure to Recognize a Public User: Musk’s Twitter Tune-up after the 2022 Twitter Black Hole

If you don’t log into your user account, you can’t see the previous information that was available to the public. Instead, you’ll likely be met with the Twitter window that asks you to either sign in to the platform or create a new account, effectively blocking you from viewing tweets and user profiles or browsing through threads unless you’re a registered Twitter user.

You can’t see what’s happening if you sign in with a sign-in prompt regardless of how you access the website. It doesn’t even tease the content with a swift redirect. You can not see anything.

It is not clear whether this is an update or a technical mistake, as the public announcement hasn’t been made. If Twitter stands by the changes, however, they both contradict and support other actions that owner Elon Musk has taken in the past year. In 2022, Musk hired noted iPhone hacker George Hotz to fix its search feature and get rid of the login prompt that prevents unregistered users from browsing the website. Hotz resigned less than halfway through his 12-week internship with the company, claiming he “didn’t think there was any real impact I could make there.” In April this year, Twitter then eliminated the platform’s search feature for unregistered users entirely.

If it’s intentional, this means that the service is nudging visitors to become official users. Free Twitter account holders can still access publicly posted tweets and other information, though many of the features that enhance user experiences (such as editing tweets and user verification) are locked behind a Twitter Blue subscription, and more of the platform’s core features could soon follow. The company could probably use the cash injection from users paying for premium features — Twitter’s US advertising revenue between April and May this year plummeted by 59 percent compared to the previous year.

Many people who tried to view, search, refresh and post content on the platform were met with error messages that read, “Rate limit exceeded” or “Cannot retrieve tweets.”

More than 7,400 people reported a problem accessing Twitter as of about 11 a.m. ET, according the website Downdetector. The number fell by 1000 reports by the early afternoon.

Musk said that “real” accounts will soon be limited to 8,000 posts per day and “real” accounts will be limited to 800 posts per day. The limit on new, unverified accounts is 400 per day.

Users have been struck as a ploy to get them to pay more money in order to access a better experience, as a result of the recent set of limitations.

There were reports of mass layoffs at the company, and Musk said that was financially necessary for the company. Ad revenue at the site has taken a dive since the acquisition of Space X by the CEO.