A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck 🦆Jul 1, 2023
could have spent a full year spitballing how musk was going to kill Twitter and couldn’t have come up with anything close to the unbelievable dipshittery of “users can only read 600 tweets a day” like, what do they put in billionaire cocaine anyway
Show threadWarren TerraJul 1, 2023
@JuliusGoat
He's since announced he's increasing that limit, TWICE (to 800 and to 1000) but also the problems people are having are not the result of exceeding whatever limit he's supposedly set, the site just is not working.
Show threadMikeJul 2, 2023
@warren__terra @JuliusGoat apparently the limits are making it worse. Because the app just keeps going “I haven’t got new tweets in a while” and requests more but the server says “no you’ve had enough” and the app just responds by requesting again in an infinite loop, bogging down the server.
Show threadWarren TerraJul 2, 2023

@mpriester @JuliusGoat
There seem to be SO MANY theories about the things going wrong here:
1) Twitter used web services from Google on a contract that expired on 30 June. Twitter reportedly had been stiffing Google on the contract, until the new CEO settled the tab, but also wanted to renegotiate new terms and who knows how that went.
2) Same as (1) but AWS not Google.
3) Twitter was trying to rework systems so they wouldn't need Google's services (or AWS) and might have broken somethin.

Ctd!

Show threadWarren TerraJul 2, 2023
@mpriester @JuliusGoat
4) Also there's the whole business about banning use of Twitter without logging in as a user. It's easy to imagine all sorts of unintended consequences of this; I've seen assertions that every embedded tweet in every webpage out there qualifies as this, and so every one of them was failing and each time it failed it sent a new request to Twitter, many times a second. And who knows what internal systems might resemble Twitter use without logging in?
Show threadWarren TerraJul 2, 2023

@mpriester @JuliusGoat
5) And the above don't even include the limits they supposedly decided to impose! It's unclear if the limits were even real, but it's obvious many people were getting "rate limited" within seconds; if they even exist, the limits might be an attempt to compensate for or to cover for other capacity problems Twitter is having.

It's truly remarkable that no one can even tell which problem is breaking Twitter - or indeed how many of them are doing it simultaneously.

Show threadPamela Ehn
@warren__terra @mpriester @JuliusGoat the rate limiting was because he failed to migrate his data away from Google (probably because he fired those who could make that happen) and didn’t pay his Google bill. Then in a desperate attempt to keep Twitter from crashing, he imposed rate limits that not only did not solve the problem, but made things WORSE, causing self-created denial of service attacks. And now he wants people to pay for something that doesn’t work. This shows he’s neither an engineer nor a businessman.
Jul 2, 2023 at 2:08pmWeb