Twitter Applications Experiencing Issues After Elon Musk Limits Tweet Frequency

In recent days, Twitter has implemented changes that restrict access to tweets unless users are logged in and also limit the number of tweets users can read. These measures, aimed at preventing data scraping, are now affecting other platforms within Twitter’s ecosystem. Many users have reported that Tweetdeck, a more advanced version of Twitter, is no longer functioning properly. Furthermore, Google Search is reportedly displaying significantly fewer Twitter URLs due to the new requirement of being logged in. This information was reported by Search Engine Roundtable.

For many users (including ReturnByte), Tweetdeck stopped working as it just seemed to spin a wheel above most of the columns. This could be because a flaw in Twitter’s web app sends requests in an infinite loop, effectively creating a “self-DDOS” (distributed denial of service), Waxy reports. As researcher Molly White tweeted , this effect multiplies on Tweetdeck for everything other than the “Home” column because it “repeatedly retries 404s,” she wrote.

It’s possible to at least make the columns visible using the new beta version of Tweetdeck, as ReturnByte’s Matt Brian tweeted. However, these columns are still subject to rate limits (800 tweets for non-Twitter Blue subscribers), so most users will stop seeing new tweets soon after downloading Tweetdeck.

On top of that, Google search may show up to 50 percent fewer Twitter URLs after Musk’s move to block unregistered users. Using the site command, Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz found that Google’s index now has about 52 percent fewer Twitter URLs than it did on Friday. It still shows the most recent Tweets in the search carousel, but normal indexing seems to be gone for now. “Not that site command is the best metric, but…Twitter has dropped [about] 162 million indexed pages so far since this change,” Schwartz tweeted.

There’s no confirmation that the “self-DDOS” theory is correct, but a post by developer Sheldon Chang (on Mastodon) indicated that turning off Twitter’s anonymous access might be contributing to the problems. Twitter has promised that the login requirement and speed limit will be “temporary”, but has not yet given a date for removing these restrictions.