Early Friday afternoon, netizens noticed that Twitter would no longer allow people to view tweets if they weren’t registered with the service. At the time, it was difficult to tell if the change was due to a technical error or a deliberate decision by the company’s leadership. Later in the day, however, Elon Musk took up the issue.
Several hundred (maybe more) organizations were scraping Twitter data so aggressively, that it was affecting the real user experience.
What must we do to stop it? I am open to ideas.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2023
“Temporary emergency measure” claimed in a tweet. “We have been getting data looted to a large extent which has degraded the service for regular users!” Musk later shared more context. “Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were mining Twitter data so intensely, that it was affecting the real user experience.” , in response to a tweet from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney lamenting the “increasingly broken” state of the internet. In a separate tweet, she spotted it Twitter Engineer Aquil Mekdad The company will re-enable access after you sign out “in the near future.”
Of course, without more information, it’s hard to tell whether Twitter users are suffering from degradation of service due to data scrapers that Musk claims are aggressively targeting the platform. There is no team at Twitter that hasn’t been touched by Musk’s cost cuts. In fact, the group responsible for keeping Twitter’s servers stable has seen its fair share of. In June, the company also had a Google Cloud contract for several months.
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