Thousands of twitter users suffer twitter down; Twitter rate limit explained.
Thousands of twitter users suffer twitter down; Yesterday, twitter put up a temporary rate limit for all of their users.
Elon Musk explained; 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.”
What is this temporary rate limit;
Twitter’s rate limiting is not what everyone is thinking it is. It is not to punish non-paying users.
“Data scraping” is a big deal. This is where automated systems load the website or app and pull your tweets/data. It’s a huge security issue. Automated systems are pulling every tweet/word/user account information to store in an unknown database somewhere else.
This could be state actors like China, the US Government, Australia, or other bad political actors like PAC’s that are trying to gain access to everyone’s information to analyze and use for nefarious things. Manipulating what is said on the site can be done at scale with data scrapping.
It could also be used to figure out the identity of Anons or to punish people in their country for what they tweet.
The temporary measures of limiting tweets is to protect users just as much as it is to protect the entire Twitter network from going down. They are currently scrambling to get ahead of this and tune their network security to block it from happening again.
It’s also important to note that twitter has 500,000+ servers. That’s not free. In cloud data centers, the companies that use them have to pay for what is called “ingress and egress” of data going “in and out” of the servers.
A data scrapping event that is large enough for them to start limiting means that it was a MASSIVE event that could be considered an attack on the site.
It would also put massive load on their servers and cost them so much money it could threaten the site’s financial ability to keep running. It could be on purpose to put twitter out of business from cost alone.
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