Twitter Is Falling Apart as Massive Failures Break the System

Editor’s Note: I don’t completely agree with the assessment below by Epic Economist that Twitter is falling apart. The move to limit accounts may be part of a greater plan to fix Twitter, not destroy it. Here’s an analysis of that possibility:

This guy wins todays internet award for correctly analyzing all the factors in Twitters lockdown.

The intelligence community built a “Censorship Deathstar” by scrapping everyone’s data and Elon just threw a fat monkey wrench into the whole machine.

pic.twitter.com/JbDmUyP1Si

— Zach Vorhies / Google Whistleblower (@Perpetualmaniac) July 1, 2023

I’m not saying the Epic Economist is wrong. Their analysis may be spot on and it’s based on opinions from some trusted sources. But if there’s one thing I’ve found to be true about prognostications regarding Twitter, it’s that future success or failure predictions seem to lean toward the desires of those doing the analysis. Those who want Twitter to succeed predict it will. Those who want it to fail also predict it will. Here’s the Epic Economist…

If you have any social media, you probably already heard by now that something is really wrong with the Twitter system. Over the weekend, users started noticing that their timeline wasn’t loading. The only message they could read was “Rate limit exceeded”.

At first, many people didn’t think too much of it. After billionaire Elon Musk took over the company last October, outages became all too common on the platform. But then, Musk revealed that Twitter was introducing a limit on how many tweets users can view per day.

The move was met with a chorus of disapproval, and many experts in the financial and tech world suggested that the company is being destroyed, and these actions are proof that the app is falling apart at the seams. With a billionaire debt and poor performance, bankruptcy is a real possibility, new data exposes. In today’s video, we investigate what is behind Twitter’s downfall, and how Musk’s moves are leading the company to its ruin.

With over 240 million users worldwide, social media giant Twitter has been on a rollercoaster ride since tech billionaire Elon Musk became the head of the company late last year. Thousands of jobs were eliminated, parts of the social network just stopped working, with users constantly reporting that replies to tweets are showing up out of order, the notifications tab isn’t updating as frequently as it should, and the two-factor authentication tool has also been facing extensive failures.

The situation only seems to be getting worse as Musk announced yet another controversial change in the platform that is seriously upsetting users.. The Twitter owner said he introduced a limit on how many tweets users can view every day. He first said that verified accounts could read 6,000 posts a day, while unverified accounts could only see 600, and new unverified users would have access to only 200 tweets. Hours later, he said the cap was raised to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 per day for unverified and 500 posts per day for new unverified users.

The action sparked outrage amongst former Twitter employees. Yoel Roth, who worked in the user trust and site integrity team for seven years, said this “isn’t even the first time they’ve completely broken the site by bumbling around in the rate limiter”. “Futzing with rate limits is probably the easiest way to break Twitter,” he wrote on Bluesky, an alternative to Twitter.

Since the beginning of 2023, the company suffered twelve service disruptions, according to Internet watchdog NetBlocks, compared to nine tracked throughout all of 2022. These glitches are proof that the company is scrambling. For months now, Elon Musk is not paying rent for the Twitter HQ building. He also held out on paying Amazon Web Services which led the company to threaten to withdraw advertising money from Twitter. And now, he’s trying to avoid paying Google Could without having the infrastructure in place to deal with the aftermath

The numbers reveal that bankruptcy is still a very real possibility. Given the tremendous amount of debt that Musk took on to purchase Twitter, whose annual payments on the debt will far outstrip the annual profits for years and the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that will need to be reinvested into the company to rebuild it with new hires, these events are a clear demonstration that the company is not standing on solid financial footing.