Rarely has Twitter suffered from such a malfunction, if it can even be described as such in view of its intended purpose. For several days now, users of the social network have seen their reading of tweets clearly shortened.
As of now, it is no longer possible to scroll to infinity in your newsfeed, as a message stating “Rate Limit Exceeded” appears after a few updates. If from the start Internet users could believe in a new failure of Twitter, it is a restriction controlled by the teams of the social network.
· What functions are affected?
Reading tweets, or rather the impossibility of reading them, is the key element of this new chaos on Twitter. Elon Musk initially mentioned limiting classic users’ news feeds to 600 tweets per day, 6,000 tweets for Twitter Blue subscribers, and 300 tweets for recent accounts.
However, a few hours later, the owner of the social network announced an improvement of this limit with 1000 tweets for regular users and 10,000 tweets for paid subscribers.
In addition to tweets in News Feed, reading quotes, replies, and even her own tweets on her profile was also affected, with the same message looping: “Frequency limit exceeded. Please wait a moment and try again.” .
· What is the reason for this restriction?
Officially, Elon Musk indicates that this limitation on tweets is due to an “extreme level” of data recovery and that it was necessary to contain the use of social network data by third parties. Among other things, they would like to use this data to feed artificial intelligence models.
More ironically, Elon Musk specifies that this Twitter restriction could help Internet users leave the screens to benefit more from their friends and family.
Some people also mention payment problems for the Google Cloud hosting service, with which the social network had partnered in 2018. The end of the contract was registered on June 30, 2023 and according to the Platformer specialized media, the invoices remained unpaid. since the arrival of Elon Musk at the helm of Twitter.
A default that could affect the malfunction of the platform, although, for the moment, no correlation has been shown between these two events.
The limitation of tweets is mainly due to a first restriction implemented by the social network a few hours before and which went more unnoticed: the impossibility of reading tweets without logging in and giving your identifiers.
· Is Twitter sabotaging itself?
According to some specialists, this obligation to connect to check Twitter could have caused difficulties similar to a denial of service attack (which consists of making a site inaccessible by multiplying connections to saturate the servers)… directly caused by the platform.
Faced with the impossibility of accessing Twitter without identifiers, some of the company’s own services would have tried a new loop connection on the platform (sometimes up to ten requests per second), causing server saturation. Once again, this justification is not yet confirmed.
· Can we expect a return to normalcy?
In his tweets, Elon Musk indicates that these restrictive measures are “temporary”, but does not specify any date for the return to normality. However, for several hours, many Internet users have been able to verify the disappearance of the restrictions in the news feeds.
It remains to be seen for how long. If these limitations were to continue, it could benefit other social networks. The Mastodon decentralized platform, for example, once again took advantage of its competitor’s flaws with 100,000 new users in the last few days. Above all, a future competing network, created by Facebook, should be available in the next few days.
Source: BFM TV
