TweetDeck Faces Major Issues Amidst Twitter's Daily Tweet-Viewing Limits

Twitter’s popular interface for power users, TweetDeck, is facing significant issues following Elon Musk’s announcement of daily tweet-viewing limits. The Verge, along with various users on the platform, including a Twitter Blue subscriber, have reported encountering an empty interface instead of the usual stream of tweets. The problems encompass multiple aspects of the interface, with notifications, mentions, likes, and lists failing to load.

While users have been experiencing Twitter issues over the weekend, the problems with TweetDeck specifically pose challenges for professional and power users who heavily rely on the platform to establish their brands, promote their work, and utilize it as a reporting tool for newsrooms.

These issues are believed to be related to the recent limits on tweet viewing announced by Elon Musk on July 1. Musk cited the need for these “temporary” limits to address concerns of excessive data scraping and system manipulation on the platform. Verified accounts, typically Twitter Blue subscribers, were initially restricted to viewing 6,000 tweets per day, while other accounts faced limits of either 600 or 300 tweets based on their account age.

Subsequently, Musk increased the tweet limits for verified subscribers to 10,000, while for other users, the limits were set between 1,000 and 500 tweets. As of Monday morning, Twitter’s main website and apps appear to be functioning normally, with the issues primarily affecting TweetDeck.

The tweet-viewing limits were introduced a day after Twitter started blocking unregistered users from accessing tweets due to similar reasons. Musk stated that “several hundred organizations” were aggressively scraping Twitter data, which severely impacted the user experience. The implication is that AI companies were scraping Twitter for training large language models.

While Musk portrays the limits as a deliberate measure, it is another instance highlighting Twitter’s recent reliability challenges. In early March, the platform experienced an outage that prevented users from viewing images or accessing links shared on the platform. This problem was believed to be caused by a misconfiguration change made by the sole engineer responsible for restricting free access to the Twitter API.

Following his assumption of ownership, Musk initiated a series of layoffs, leaving critical infrastructure and user experience teams with a significantly reduced staff. Musk claims to have laid off over 6,000 Twitter employees, reducing the total headcount from under 8,000 to approximately 1,500. Additionally, there were reports that Twitter temporarily halted payments to Google Cloud until the company’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, mended the relationship.

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