Phony Stark, aka Elon Musk Broke Twitter, Black Twitter’s Migration To Spill Officially Underway

Source: Anadolu Agency / Getty / Elon Musk

Phony Stark, aka Elon Musk’s masterclass in breaking something that worked perfectly before he bought it, is pretty much complete. Over the weekend, Twitter was an absolute mess, and Black Twitter became officially fed up with the platform.

What the hell is a rate limit?

That’s what many Twitter users were asking over the weekend and some still as of today. Elon Musk took to his broken platform to reveal that all users were hit with limits on how many tweets they could read, causing a significant outage as people tried to keep up with what was happening in the world.

The Trump of Tech said in a tweet that verified account users can see up to 6,000 posts daily, while unverified users only see 600.

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:

– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

Newly registered Twitter users got it the worse, only being allowed to see 300 tweets per day. He eventually lifted that number to 10,000, 1,000, and 500, but the damage was done.

Now to 10k, 1k & 0.5k

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2023

Musk claims that his platform is dealing with “extreme levels of data scraping” from “several hundred organizations” and “system manipulation” while not naming precisely who is doing it.

Is Elon Musk Lying?

Of course, people are calling C A P on Musk’s claims. Spotted on Crooks and Liars, web developer Sheldon Chang accused the Tesla and Space X chief’s Twitter “DDOSing itself, on rival Mastodon.

Per Crooks and Liars:

This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.

The Twitter home feed’s been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.

In the first video, notice the error message that I’m being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.

The second video shows why it’s jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon’s latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.

This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.

Unbelievable. It’s amateur hour.

Another developer was able to back up Chang’s claims by also replicating those DDOSing results.

Lol the Twitter webapp is trying to load something from its internal graphql API and getting a 429 Too Many Requests response. Twitter's Javascript ignores the error and tries again, hundreds of times a second.

Twitter is DDOSing itself.

— @nelson@tech.lgbt (@nelson) July 1, 2023

Another claim accuses Musk and Twitter of simply not paying their bills after it moved from Google’s Cloud Services to their servers, and that’s when all of the issues began.

spotted on bl*esky pic.twitter.com/tvMWlZmFyZ

— Gary Whitta (rate limit exceeded) (@garywhitta) July 2, 2023

Black Twitter Is Packing Up & Leaving

Since Musk took over and imposed many dumb ideas, users have been looking for a substitute for Twitter. BlueSky caught on immediately but, per The Verge’s reporting, is pausing sign-ups “temporarily” as it deals with the influx of people signing up to use the platform.

In a BlueSky post, the company said:

“We will temporarily be pausing Bluesky sign-ups while our team continues to resolve the existing performance issues. We’ll keep you updated when invite codes will resume functionality. We’re excited to welcome more users to our beta soon!”

Black Twitter, which basically makes the platform pop, is done with Elon, and his shenanigans are on the move to Spill, which happens to be founded by two former Twitter employees, Alphonzo “Phonz” Terrell, and DeVaris Brown.

If you look up and down Twitter timelines, it’s Black users sharing their Spill profiles or asking for invite codes so they can join the mass exodus.

Welp.

Is this truly the end of Twitter? That remains to be seen, but it’s looking like it’s on its way into social media purgatory.

You can see more reactions to Elon Musk breaking Twitter in the gallery below.

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Photos: Anadolu Agency / Getty