It’s been a few weeks since Twitter’s chaos reached noteworthy proportions, but that all changed this weekend when owner and CTO Elon Musk announced the introduction of limits on how many tweets users can see each day.
It started on Saturday afternoon, July 1st with a tweet by Musk informing Tweeps that strict rate caps would be put in place “to counteract the extreme level of data theft and system manipulation”. Under the new order, basic, unverified users (i.e. those who chose not to pay for Twitter Blue) were told they could only see 600 posts per day, while new accounts were limited to just 400 tweet views .
Verified accounts were granted the right to view 6,000 tweets, which is considered another Blue subscription benefit.
It only took Musk a few hours To update This total allows for 8,000/800/400 views for verified, unverified, and new users respectively. That followed shortly thereafter News that the limits were increased to 10,000/1,000/500, but it’s unclear if those increases were ever applied or when Twitter’s rate limit would end.
The Register inquired about the current status of Twitter’s rate caps, how long Musk tends to maintain those caps, and questioned Elon’s rationale. Despite the fact that there’s a new CEO drawing water from the boiler room, Twitter doesn’t seem to have considered the lack of a communications team – we just got the usual poomoji for our trouble.
Maybe it’s time for a new CTO
Twitter has faced many problems of late that Twitter CTO and CEO Musk, who stepped down as Twitter CEO when Linda Yaccarino took over in early June, attributed almost entirely to greed from AI companies.
The data Twitter contains, Musk argues, is invaluable to big language model AIs like ChatGPT and Google Bard, and they should pay for the right to scrape it.
In addition to charging extremely high prices for Twitter’s data APIs, Twitter’s CTO also decided last week to block all users who aren’t logged into Twitter from viewing any posts, unintentionally disabling tweet embeds in other apps become. That, Musk claims on Friday would also be temporary.
“According to my previous post, the EXTREME level of data scraping required drastic and immediate action,” Musk said. “It’s quite annoying to have to bring a large number of servers online in an emergency just to facilitate the outrageous evaluation of an AI startup.”
As with anything related to Twitter and Musk, the truth is harder to pin down.
Take, for example, the fact that under Musk, Twitter has made a habit of not paying its bills to save money and try to break even. This arguably unwise move wasn’t just limited to bonuses, legal fees, and suppliers — Twitter has reportedly taken tougher action on Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, which also hosts much of its infrastructure.
Twitter reportedly owed AWS up to $70m (£55m) back in March, prompting Amazon to threaten to withhold ad payments over the bird page. Twitter’s reported $200 million to $300 million annual deal with Google Cloud was also unpaid. Yaccarino reportedly renegotiated the start of those payments in late June, just days before Twitter’s contract with Google Cloud was due to expire on June 30 — the day before the tariff caps went into effect.
We’ve contacted Google and Amazon for an insight into the status of their respective relationships with Twitter and whether they’ve blocked access to portions of Twitter hosted in their clouds, but have received no response from either.
If it’s not unpaid bills Twitter is catching up on, poor coding may be the culprit. A number of people claim to have found evidence that Twitter’s front-end appears to be performing DDoS attacks on its back-end, as Twitter access has been blocked for anyone who isn’t logged in.
Developer Sheldon Chang pointed this out in a post to Mastodon over the weekend, including a video capture of Chrome’s developer tools showing a wall of failed Get requests. Chang said the Twitter web app “fires about 10 requests per second at itself to fetch content that never arrives,” which he says likely results in “hellish conditions the engineers never imagined.” .
With Tweetdeck the problem is even worse, after to Molly White, who posted a similar video of Chrome’s development tools, riddled with 404 warnings when Tweetdeck tried to fetch content that would normally be available to Twitter visitors who aren’t logged in.
That’s certainly a good reason to impose rate caps, but like the unpaid bills, it’s unclear whether Twitter’s move is also the cause of the weekend chaos. We’ve asked this question too, and we have to hope Yaccarino decides to change course on another one Musk decision. ®