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“This is absolutely related to Twitter not paying their Google Cloud bills” (twitter.com/torinrozzelle)
18 points by thehodge on July 1, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 9 comments



Edit - on the front page, I didn't see it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36552324

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Context is that twitter has imposed rate limits (view max 600 tweets per day for normal users, more for paid, less for new accounts).

They cited scraping as being the reason and said it was degrading their performance, but there are contentions that it's because they aren't paying their cloud bills.

I'd like to see some concrete verification of this, it would be really bad for Musk's credibility if true.


Musk not paying suppliers? That's normal life in Tesla. Does not seems to work with cloud platforms.


"June 21 (Reuters) - Twitter has resumed paying Alphabet's (GOOGL.O) Google Cloud for its services, according to a person familiar with the matter"

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-resumes-paying-go...


Thanks for linking to an explanation of why the site is down on the site that is down.


Tweet is a screenshot of an engadget.com mobile article. The screenshot reads

"More platform instability could be in Twitter's near future. In 2018, Twitter signed a $1 billion contract with Google to host some of its services on the company's Google Cloud servers.

Platformer reports Twitter recently refused to pay the search giant ahead of the contract's June 30th renewal date.

Twitter is reportedly rushing to move as many services off of Google's infrastructure before the contract expires, but the effort is "running behind schedule," putting some tools, including Smyte, a platform the company acquired in 2018 to bolster its moderation capabilities, in danger of going offline."


Twitter could've simply announced they were going into maintenance mode for the weekend, and most people would've taken the hint about reduced availability.

Many of us privacy freaks were content accessing via Nitter, and had no use for directly connecting our personal machines to the site, nor registering. I am curious if we were considered bots.

Time will tell, but I doubt anyone has the actual explanation for what is going on exactly.


I still have 4 more tweets that I can see today so as long as I only refresh this tweet three more times. I'm good.


Honestly... A 600 tweet limit is not a bad idea if you're already limiting viewing tweets to people who has an account. Taking into account that people without an account don't add anything if value to the platform other than traffic costs. However this will limit the amount of potential new users on the platform - but considering the size of twitter I don't think it is an issue.

Now next on the agenda is identifying all the bots that circle jerks each other and spreads fake news.


rate limiting twitter app usage to a point where regular users are not using the app anymore should be directly cutting advertising revenue




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