Hey everyone, We announced last week that we would be dynamically changing rate limits and many of you noticed we have been doing that. There are many techniques we've used and improvements we will continue to make to deal with our capacity issues. Reducing the API rate-limit is not the first or only method we use and is one we try to avoid if possible. However, it is also one of the more effective ways to reduce load and ensure that the Twitter service remains available to the greatest number of users.
To ensure we can maintain service we're lowering the default rate limit to 175. Even with this lowered default limit we will still have times when we need to dynamically change the allowed requests. Today is one of those days where that has been required. In these situations you can stay up to date by visiting http://status.twitter.com and following @twitterapi. We're all in the same boat here, Twitter uses the API for it's own services so we also feel these reduced limits. All the Twitter for mobile devices and mobile sites are being affected by this change. But we need to do this to ensure the site and API stay available to as wide an audience as possible. We don't want to be delivering service failures to everyone. We know there are still some questions around the dynamic rate limiting and we have put together an FAQ at http://dev.twitter.com/pages/rate_limiting_faq which we hope answers them. Thank you for your patience. Matt Harris Developer Advocate, Twitter http://twitter.com/themattharris
