Mastodawn

Andy Baio Jul 1, 2023

For the last two days, Elon Musk has been publicly freaking out about "EXTREME levels of data scraping," so added "temporary emergency measures" like blocking logged-out views and adding tight rate limits on viewing tweets. But, apparently noticed first here by @sysop408, a Javascript bug in the Twitter web app is self-DDOSing their servers, sending an endless loop of requests — which seems related to their scraping panic. https://waxy.org/2023/07/twitter-bug-causes-self-ddos-possibly-causing-elon-musks-emergency-blocks-and-rate-limits-its-amateur-hour/

Twitter bug causes self-DDOS tied to Elon Musk's emergency blocks and rate limits: "It's amateur hour" - Waxy.org

An "amateur hour" Javascript bug is self-DDOSing Twitter, sending infinite requests from users related to — or possibly even causing — Elon Musk's "temporary emergency measures" to stop web scraping.

Waxy.org

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Sheldon Jul 1, 2023

@andybaio it's probably not the cause of their scraping panic and most of these requests are being blocked.

What I don't know is if MY requests were getting blocked after I launched a few hundred unwittingly or if they just completely shut down a service because it was getting bombarded.

Either way, it's not good and even if this glitch had nothing to do with today's problems, it's still stunning that something this awful got to production.

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Andy Baio

@sysop408 Thanks for the reply, I agree it's unlikely but at this point, nothing would surprise me over there. I adjusted the headline and ending to make that clearer.