Twitter users claim Elon Musk’s recent changes may be “self-DDoSing” the platform

Though Elon Musk has explained that rate limits for Twitter are likely the reason behind some users being unable to access the platform, others have speculated that recent changes to how Tweets can be viewed have resulted in Twitter “self-DDoSing” by overloading its server with requests.

Ever since Elon Musk bought out Twitter, his changes to the platform have been controversial. Between Twitter Blue eradicating legacy verified badges and various changes that incentivize people to pay for Twitter, not everyone has been happy with his leadership.

And, despite him having officially given over the CEO title to Linda Yaccarino, Elon Musk still has a massive presence on the platform and announces many of the biggest changes to the way users interact with Twitter.

Though recent troubles with the platform being accessed have been explained as a temporarily enforced limit on Twitter traffic on a per-user basis, tech-savvy users on the platform think there may be something else afoot here.

Twitter users claim the platform may be overloading itself

While the change to restrict how many Tweets users can view per day is surely a contributor to recent issues with the platform, there’s also another fairly recent change that some users weren’t particularly happy with.

Recently, Twitter was changed to only be accessible to logged-in users. Before, users that browsed while not logged in would eventually be prompted to create an account or sign in. Now people can’t even access the site unless they have an account currently logged in.

This has resulted in Twitter requesting data that never comes, creating what’s essentially a feedback loop that could be overloading their servers.

For those unaware, a DDoS attack (aka distributed denial of service) is often carried out by overloading a server with so many requests that it shuts down.

If you’ve ever tried to access a popular online game on launch day and been unable to access servers, it’s likely because the servers are overloaded with people trying to get in and play. A DDoS attack is functionally the same thing except those requests are manufactured.

However, in the case of recent changes to Twitter, some users have claimed that the amount of requests sent to Twitter as a result of the site being blocked across so many platforms has created a scenario where the servers cannibalize themselves, sending out a massive number of requests for data that have no hope of being fulfilled. Thus a “self-DDoS”.

It remains to be seen whether or not this is one of the reasons behind Twitter’s recent problems, but users are convinced that some of the recent changes have led to some unintended consequences.