- Elon Musk abruptly decided to give all Twitter users a maximum amount of access to the site.
- The move was not announced to the staff, leaving workers scrambling over another holiday weekend.
- Twitter workers have received little communication on the change from Musk and CEO Linda Yaccarino.
Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, again threw the social-media platform into chaos by suddenly deciding on Saturday to impose a strict “rate limit” on every Twitter user, leaving even employees in the dark about this change.
The change allows users to view only a certain number of tweets before being prevented from interacting with the site. There has been almost no communication about what is happening and why from top management, two people familiar with the company said. Now, many engineers must work through the July 4 weekend and holiday to combat various problems created by new rate limits, along with trying to fix “bad code,” as one of the people put it.
“Neither of them have said anything about what’s going on,” one of the people familiar said, referring to Musk and Twitter’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino. “There has been no companywide communication.”
Once Musk decided to implement the rate limit, many Twitter workers asked in private Slack channels whether it was a permanent change. Sales and advertising employees asked what they were supposed to tell clients about how the rate limit would affect ads and have received no answers, the people familiar said.
Chris Riedy, the company’s vice president of global sales and marketing, did on Sunday send a note to Twitter’s sales team saying the rate limits were being imposed in an effort to combat “spam and bots” on the site. Riedy added that the rate limits would begin to “ease up” in the coming days.
Twitter declined to comment.
Musk has for months been discussing ways to force more Twitter users to sign up for the paid subscription tier Twitter Blue, including by limiting the number of tweets people can create and interact with and even the number of direct messages they can send. Still, there was no official plan to roll those out, the people familiar said.
“This is one of the dumbest things he’s ever done,” one person familiar said. “And that’s saying a lot.”
Musk announced the rate limits on Twitter hours after the change was made, saying it needed to be done because of “data scraping” and “system manipulation” going on. There had been no widespread awareness inside the company of any kind of harmful data scraping occurring, one of the people familiar said. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, said the claim “didn’t pass the smell test.”
In addition, Twitter made a change the day prior requiring users to be logged in to see any content on the site. Such choices seemed to degrade the Twitter experience for hundreds of millions of monthly users and further imperil its core advertising business, while possibly setting up Yaccarino to fail.
Twitter has a ‘skeleton crew’
Twitter engineers are already down to roughly 500 people from more than 3,500 before Musk’s ownership, largely because of his massive layoffs. Current and former employees have predicted for months that so few engineers on hand would lead to noticeable issues.
“A skeleton crew is all that’s left,” one of the people familiar said of Twitter’s engineering ranks.
A web developer named Sheldon Chang said bad code had caused Twitter to overload itself the past several days, possibly making Musk think the site was under attack by data scrapers. In videos he posted to Mastodon, Chang showed Twitter sending roughly “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,” Chang added.
A former Twitter executive said a combination of so few engineers constantly rushing to meet Musk’s demands and the “huge lack of institutional knowledge” left at the company would only result in more technical problems.
“It’s hard to watch,” the person said.
Twitter’s ads business could take a hit
Twitter’s ability to charge for ads, as with any other social-media platform, relies on how many people will see an advertiser’s content. Capping the amount of content users can see may mean fewer people can see Twitter’s ads. Musk’s Twitter tenure has already seen a mass exodus of advertisers, wounding the site’s core revenue stream.
Riedy said in his note to sales staff that no advertising campaigns had been negatively affected and their performance was being monitored, a person familiar said.
Advertisers appear less certain that all is under control. Yaccarino’s position as CEO, despite Musk maintaining control over much of Twitter, is meant to stabilize operations and bring ad clients back into the fold. Advertisers and agencies already see her abilities being hobbled by Musk’s antics.
“This move signals to the marketplace that he’s not capable of empowering her to save him from himself,” Lou Paskalis, the founder of the advertising consultancy AJL Advisory, told Reuters.
Are you a Twitter employee or someone else with insight to share? Contact Kali Hays at [email protected], on the secure messaging app Signal at 949-280-0267, or through Twitter DM at @hayskali. Reach out using a nonwork device.
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