There is NOT a limit on claps. There’s a limit on how many stories you can clap for in a 24 hour period. It doesn’t matter if you clapped 1 clap per story or 50, when you reach 150 stories in a day and you’ve clapped for each one, you have to wait until the next 24 hour period begins before you can clap again. It’s a simple enough device to prevent bots from raising the visibility on thousands of stories in short time frames.

But yeah, Medium periodically has glitches on both its main and mobile platforms that (a) don’t register claps, and (b) roll back claps close to the end of the month, when engagement is being calculated for the Partner Program. Apparently their techs don’t know how to take a snapshot at a specific time of database tables and allow the production tables to keep accruing data. So there are some valid reasons for claps to disappear or never get counted.