It seems that Twitter has not had a good time recently. While Elon Musk has claimed that Twitter is under attack from “several hundred organisations” that are trying to scrape data from the platform, restrictions on accessibility to tweets have been put on users. Though it is claimed by Elon Musk, that these measures are “temporary” and have been enacted on an “emergency basis,” it does raise one question about any foul play.
Twitter has started putting restrictions on how many tweets any user can view, in addition to making it mandatory to log in to access any tweet. Elon Musk called this a “temporary emergency measure,” as he claimed that the platform was “getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!”
This did not stop here. Musk further escalated the platform’s actions against the asserted “extreme levels of data scraping.” Twitter launched a restriction on the number of tweets one can view, even for paid subscribers to Twitter Blue. Those who have verified accounts will be able to read 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts will have access to 600 posts a day, and new unverified accounts will have access to 300 posts a day.
Because of this move, users complained of seeing “Rate Limit Exceeded” messages. Reportedly, every trending topic on the platform was about Twitter going down. All these measures come in the face of AI companies scrapping Twitter. Though Musk did not mention any specific company but it is possible that these giants are using the platform’s data for training purposes.
What’s more, a web developer named Sheldon Chang on Mastodon reported that a bug in Twitter’s web app is continuously sending requests to Twitter in an infinite loop. The web developer reported that Twitter is “DDOSing itself.” Interestingly, according to Chang, though nothing was loading, the website did not stop trying. Chang pointed out in a video that he posted that the platform is firing off 10 requests a second in order to get content that is not available, and this has happened because Twitter has moved to block people from reading tweets without logging in.
Chang posted a video that showed that a bug is acting up and sending hundreds of requests a minute. Though it is not clear how much the bug was impacting traffic, it is also not clear whether the bug was produced as a result of the changes that Twitter made or whether the bug is the reason behind blocking unregistered access and rate limits.
Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety on Twitter, expressed on Bluesky, “For anyone keeping track, this isn’t even the first time they’ve completely broken the site by bumbling around in the rate limiter. There’s a reason the limiter was one of the most locked down internal tools. Futzing around with rate limits is probably the easiest way to break Twitter.”
Though Sheldon Chang has expressed that restrictions on unregistered users are related to the bug, on Mastodon, in a follow up tweet, Sheldon Chang wrote that these measures are “probably not the cause of their scraping panic, and most of these requests are being blocked.”
It can also be observed that since Twitter took the decision to change its free access to the Twitter API to paid, this has had a huge impact on various companies. Developers, researchers, bot makers, and others account for a small fraction. But this measure saw apps and websites that were able to share content to and from Twitter encounter a functionality break, like WordPress and Echobox. However, it is possible that these measures are completely unrelated.
Also Read: Twitter will not let you view tweets unless you do “this”
Though the platform claims that these measures come in the face of an emergency situation, it is possible that all of this may be caused by a bug in the Javascript, or it could be another fault on the part of Twitter as they default on bill payments.
