How a single bug in Twitter's own web app may be triggering more problems for Musk

Over the past two days, Elon Musk has been claiming that Twitter is facing attacks from 'several hundred organizations' engaged in 'EXTREME levels of data scraping.' As a result, Twitter had to bring online a large number of servers and implement emergency measures. Twitter took the step of blocking all logged-out access, requiring users to sign in to view tweets or profiles. Musk referred to this as a 'temporary emergency measure' to address the excessive data pillaging that was negatively impacting service for regular users.

However, despite these actions, Twitter continued to experience heavy traffic. Musk also announced that they have escalated their response by imposing rate limits on the number of tweets users can view. As a result, Twitter users started encountering 'Rate Limit Exceeded' messages, and discussions about the collapse of Twitter became trending topics.

The Details are in the Bug

In the midst of these events, a web developer named Sheldon Chang noticed another potential source of unusual traffic. He identified a bug in Twitter's web app that appeared to be continuously sending requests to Twitter in an infinite loop. He described this situation as Twitter "DDOSing itself" and shared videos demonstrating the bug in action. Other software engineers, such as Nelson Minar, independently reproduced the bug and shared their observations.

The exact timing and impact of this bug on Twitter's traffic remain uncertain. It is unclear whether the bug led to Twitter's decision to block unregistered access and impose rate limits, or if the bug was triggered by the implementation of these changes. Twitter's former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, commented that this is not the first time such issues have arisen due to rate limiter mishaps, suggesting that tinkering with rate limits is a common cause of Twitter's site-breaking incidents.

Sheldon speculates that the bug may be related to the decision to block unregistered users from accessing Twitter, but he also believes it is probably not the main cause of the data scraping panic, as most of the requests are being blocked.

Also read: ‘Running Twitter is hard’: Twitter founder Jack Dorsey reacts after Elon Musk announces reading limits on tweets

In his post on BlueSky, Chang said, "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."

He further added, "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."

It is conceivable that the elimination of free access to the Twitter API led to an increase in scraping activities, considering that many businesses, organizations, and individuals relied on it for their projects. However, it is also possible that these issues are unrelated.

Also read: 'Elon Musk didn't pay the bill': Twitter users slam billionaire amid global outage