See your friends & family

San Francisco: A day after Twitter limited the number of tweets that accounts are permitted to view, its owner Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday morning, asking people to step away from their phones and spend time with friends and family instead.

Musk's humourous jibe at Twitter users came amid as the micro-blogging site faced backlash over the new policy to impose a temporary cap on tweet views. “Awake from a deep trance, step away from the phone to see your friends and family,” Twitter boss tweeted.

Soon after Musk's announcement on Saturday that the unverified users will be able to view as many as 600 posts a day, while Twitter Blue subscribers can see 6,000 posts, many users stormed the Twitter feeds with the suggestion that Musk's “ulterior motive” behind the rule is “to gain more subscribers.”

However, Twitter boss said the decision was taken “to address extreme levels of data scraping” and “system manipulation.” He later revised the limits to 800 and 8,000 respectively and then five hours later again, tweeted that the new limits would be 1,000 for unverified accounts and 10,000 for verified users.

The restriction resulted in users being locked out of Twitter for the day after expiring the daily limit. Soon after the announcement on Saturday, 'Twitter down' started trending on the platform with several users complaining of not being able to access the site. About 7,500 people at one point on Saturday reported problems as per Down detector – a website that tracks online outages.

Musk's latest tweet, advising users to take time off the social media platform also triggered a meme fest in the replies, with many users demanding to view “just one more tweet.” However, some users also complained that the new policy adversely affected businesses, who are seeking to promote their ventures on the platform but may face trouble with reaching out to the users.