The news of the lawsuit broke one day after Twitter owner Elon Musk revealed its plan to begin restricting the number of tweets people can see in a day to 6,000, sparking criticism from users and advertisers.

Musk said Twitter had imposed the “temporary limit” to “address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation”.

The announcement followed complaints of users being unable to access the site from 12pm onwards on Saturday, only seeing a message that read “Rate limit exceeded. Please wait a few moments then try again”, which led to '#Twitterdown' and 'RIP Twitter' to begin trending on the platform.

Adam Leon Smith of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, said it is “very odd to start rate-limiting the reading of a social network”, as limiting users’ scroll time “will affect advertising revenue”.

Musk has not specified when the limits may be increased or for how long the restrictions will be in place.