Perhaps laying off 80% of Twitter's workforce wasn't such a great idea after all, as since then the social media platform has struggled to work properly, causing many to look for more stable alternatives.
Source: Techcrunch
Twitter is putting limits to how many tweets its users can read as the Elon Musk-owned service suffers extended outage that has stymied users’ ability to track new posts.
In a tweet, Musk detailed the revised usage quotas. Verified account holders can peruse a maximum of 6,000 posts daily, while unverified users must contend with a drastically reduced limit of 600 posts.
Newly registered, unverified users face even tighter restrictions with an allowance of a mere 300 posts per day, according to the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive. (He has since increased the limit to 10,000, 1,000 and 500.)
Musk said that Twitter is wrestling with “extreme levels of data scraping” from “several hundred organizations” and “system manipulation.” These new constraints, he says, are an essential measure to curb these pressing issues. Musk did not say who was scraping Twitter’s data — or how long the issue had persisted — nor did he elaborate on the system manipulation claim.
The billionaire has previously expressed concerns about data scraping at Twitter and suggested that he may take action against the bad actors. Musk was briefly outraged over Microsoft “illegally” using Twitter’s data and threatened that it was “lawsuit time.”
Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023
However, many were calling bullshit on this self-serving explanation, with web developer Sheldon Chang giving this on a rival platform Mastodon:
This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.
The Twitter home feed’s been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.
In the first video, notice the error message that I’m being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.
The second video shows why it’s jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon’s latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.
This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.Unbelievable. It’s amateur hour.
Another software engineer was able to replicate the results.
Others have mentioned that as soon as Twitter moved from Google's Cloud Services for their servers the problems started. As Twitter had stopped paying its bills, the contract ending on June 30.
Since Musk took over Twitter it's become a veritable shitshow and a case study of how not to run a company.
Ed. Note: Follow us on Mastodon at crooksandliars@crooklyn.social
