The IT Nerd

For the last two days, Twitter has had issues. And as a result, Elon Musk has decided to limit how many Tweets that you can see. Though it’s highly likely that he’s lying about the reason why he’s doing that. This is really giving users less reasons to go to Twitter for any reason as evidenced that Mastodon signups currently look like this as of an hour ago:

Besides the top line number of over 13 million accounts on Mastodon, you’ll notice that there’s been a huge spike of account creations from Saturday onwards. That suggests to me that people are sick of Elon’s inability to run Twitter and are seeking greener pastures. But Elon doesn’t see it that way. Nor do I expect him to as he’s too self absorbed and egotistical for that level of self awareness. Here’s his reaction to the limits that he’s put on Twitter, and the fact that Twitter users aren’t happy to say the least:

In all seriousness, is this guy broken? How does Elon expect users to pay him $8 a month and advertisers to come back to the platform and pay him to advertise on it if he not only fails to have a properly working platform, but he mocks users who don’t like the fact that the platform isn’t working and complain about it? This is the 21st century equivalent of Nero fiddling while Rome is burning. And I assure you that Twitter is burning. Elon is about to find out that no social media platform is immune to crashing and burning because of dumb decisions and hubris. And what will make that a teachable moment for Elon is that it will have cost him over $44 billion to learn that lesson. Assuming his ego doesn’t get in the way of learning that lesson.

Yesterday I posted a story about Elon Musk limiting how many Tweets that one can see. And He was blaming “Data Scraping And System Manipulation” for this. And I said this at the time:

The first thing that comes to mind is that Twitter’s infrastructure is so fragile that he has no choice but to limit how many Tweets people can read. I say that because this applies to both Twitter Blue subscribers and everyone else. If Elon were simply trying yet another tactic to get you to sign up to Twitter Blue, these limits would likely not exist for Twitter Blue subscribers. 

There seems to be some evidence that support this. Sheldon Chang  on Mastodon, as unlike Twitter Mastodon still works, gave a very detailed analysis of what he is seeing on Twitter that is causing Elon to take this extreme action. The short explanation is that Twitter is doing a denial of service attack on itself.

You can read the analysis here. And I recommend that you do as it’s a very interesting read. But that isn’t the only theory that is floating around. Twitter has not been paying Google for the latter providing Google Cloud services to Twitter. New Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has been trying to fix that relationship. But Platformer (paywalled) speculates that time has run out for Twitter. The Google contract expired on June 30th. Twitter’s issues started on July 1st. So if Twitter which is insanely understaffed because of Elon’s job cuts might not have been able to move everything to other services. Thus Twitter has fallen and can’t get up.

Either way, there’s enough evidence that Elon Musk is lying about what is happening with Twitter. And in the process, he’s annoying the hell out of his users. Both paying and free users. Which means that if he wants to make Twitter implode and go from the $44 billion valuation to $0, he is really succeeding in doing so.