ELON MUSK WE'RE LIMITING TWEETS SEEN By Unverified Users

Twitter was experiencing mass outages this weekend -- and now, Elon Musk has explained why ... he's instituting a new policy that limits nonpaying customers to a daily tweet count.

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The Twitter exec addressed a massive problem Twitter users at large were experiencing Saturday -- namely, the of to see new tweets, dive into trends or refresh their main feed whatsoever. Everyone was getting hit with the same message ... Rate Limit Exceeded.

A lot of folks assumed there was some kind of server capacity problem that Twitter was experiencing -- not the first time that's happened under EM's watch -- or that there was just a glitch in the system. Wrong on both counts ... which was confirmed by Elon himself.

He wrote ... "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 followed that up with a trollish joke, saying that people were hitting their rate limits by reading all the tweets about the rate limits being exceeded -- but then changed his mind at the drop of a hat (again) by promising to up the count on all fronts by a smidge.

He says verified users will soon get 8,000 tweets per day, unverified users will get 800 and new unverified users will get 400. The bottom line, he's setting a hard cap on the number of tweets people can see in a day ... which is getting A LOT of pushback and backlash.

This appears to be yet another ploy to get people to sign up for Twitter Blue and pay to be verified -- something EM and co. have been trying to do for months now since rolling out the new service ... and coming up short on interested customers. Twitter Blue costs $8/month.

Of course, this comes in the wake of news a couple of months ago that Twitter's valuation had been slashed by at least a third since the Musk takeover. He bought it for $44 billion, but it's now reported to be worth between $8 and $15 billion ... and Elon's also been forthright about economic challenges of late, including getting new advertisers and streams of revenue.

Now he's put his user base into a corner and is forcing their hand. As a result, several Twitter users are considering other options -- and the "death" of Twitter is trending too.