Thousands of people logged complaints about problems accessing Twitter on Saturday after owner Elon Musk limited most users to viewing 600 tweets a day -- restrictions he described as an attempt to prevent unauthorized scraping of potentially valuable data from the site.
It’s alleged that the reason why is that Twitter decided not to pay their Google Cloud bill.
I was assuming that the reason was that Twitter fired all their system administrators so the services are basically held together with bubble gum and string. If too many people use the services, it’ll crash so they need to limit usage.
They can’t admit that the rate limits are due to unmaintained servers, though, so they trotted out the “people are scraping Twitter” excuse.
Come to think of it, didn’t Reddit use something like that as an excuse for the huge API pricing? Are they coordinating on how to ruin their services? If so, they’re doing a great job!
When Elon fired all of its staff there was talk about it starting to accumulate tech debt and getting less stable over time. This is the logical conclusion.