[Ari]

Turns out it was an attempt to keep the site up.

cnn

Hours after users began reporting the problems, billionaire owner Elon Musk tweeted that the site had applied temporary limits “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”

IE normal usage and bumps handled by teams fired long ago.

Pay to read

Verified accounts are limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, he tweeted, while unverified accounts are limited to just 600. New unverified accounts are at 300 posts a day.

A penny for every 200 tweets read, capped at 6,000 because you might just straight the little guys servers.

Twitter outage: Thousands of users encounter 'rate limit exceeded' error message | CNN Business