Elon “Pedo Guy” Musk’s strategy of buying Twitter at the highest price, firing anyone who understands how it works, and then running his mouth seems to be paying off. This weekend, after rate-limiting users, Twitter is plagued by service issues related to rate-limiting users. Elon is Tweeting about how these problems are the fault of “data pillagers,” but it seems it may be something else… Twitter.
It should come as no surprise that Musk and Company are pulling levers they don’t fully understand, but it would be poetic justice if they are burning off what little revenue they have left chasing self-made gremlins.
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It’s currently unclear when this bug went into production, or how much it’s actually impacting their traffic, so it’s hard to determine whether this bug inadvertently inspired Twitter to block unregistered access and add rate limits, or if the bug was triggered by the rollout of those changes.
On Bluesky, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety Yoel Roth wrote, “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.”
Sheldon suspects the bug was related to yesterday’s decision to block unregistered users from accessing Twitter, but in a followup, wrote that it’s “probably not the cause of their scraping panic and most of these requests are being blocked.”
It seems very likely that killing free access to the Twitter API led to a big increase in scraping, since countless businesses, organizations, and individuals used it for their projects. It’s also plausible that these issues are entirely unrelated.
Still, how funny would it be if this “emergency,” from start to finish, was brought on by a Javascript bug that caused Twitter to DDOS itself, spawning all of these truly terrible decisions? At this point in Twitter’s downward spiral, nothing would surprise me.
It seems unfathomable that someone who eclipsed the “bad idea” of his joke, the far too high $54.20 purchase price with his stunning “the Emperor has no clothes” moment wherein Musk waived due diligence, and then proceeded to destroy further the business he was doomed to overpay for with an expensive, yet meritless attempt to get out of buying it would follow up on his massive mistake by trashing the business, but this seems like pouring gas on the wreckage and tossing a match.
Source: Boing Boing
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