TweetDeck is the latest service to suffer due to Elon Musk's decision to impose severe read limits on Twitter to control data scraping. As of Monday morning, notifications and lists are completely broken on TweetDeck.
What Happened: Notifications and other columns, including lists, are broken and stuck on loading on TweetDeck. Benzinga can independently verify that no column except the 'Home' and 'Messages' feeds are loading on TweetDeck.
Some users also reported that even the 'Home' column did not load for them, suggesting that the issue is widespread.
Over the weekend, Musk severely restricted how many tweets a user could read, blaming it on "extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation".
Musk announced that verified users could read up to 6,000 tweets per day, while unverified users would be restricted to just 600 tweets. After these limits were imposed, the official Twitter app went completely blank for many users. In other cases, the app would simply refuse to load any tweets and return with an error stating that it could fetch tweets.
Musk subsequently raised this limit to 10,000 tweets for verified users and 1,000 tweets for unverified users.
TweetDeck is a web application that can load several columns simultaneously. It is a clutter and ad-free tool and works great for those who want to use Twitter via lists.
Before implementing these severely low read limits, Twitter started forcing users to log in to read tweets. As a result, tweets embedded on websites were broken through the weekend. While this seems to have been fixed now, Twitter still won't let logged-out users read any tweet whatsoever.
Haphazard Layoffs To Blame? This is not the first time that Twitter has suffered a major outage this year. Earlier in March, a change by a lone engineer brought down the social network. Musk would later tweet that this was due to a "small API change".
Twitter's former engineers have publicly said that Twitter would begin to see more outages going forward, for longer periods, as a direct consequence of the drastic layoffs that Musk has announced so far.
"Things will be broken more often. Things will be broken for longer periods of time. Things will be broken in more severe ways," said an unnamed Twitter engineer to MIT Technology Review.
Twitter's headcount has fallen to 20% of what it was at the end of 2021 - Musk said the headcount is now closer to 1,500, down from over 7,500 in 2021.
It's unclear if TweetDeck will eventually be fixed or if this broken mess is how things will be going forward. There were rumors earlier that Twitter would require a subscription for TweetDeck, but there has been no news lately.
