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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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FWIW Twitter seems fine for me now. It was severely degraded for a few hours on both app and web earlier but looks to have improved

If the rate limit is covering for the outage / GCP / etc, 'the rate limit still existing' means the issue is still ongoing because Twitter's still losing money

12 hours of degraded service is a bad look for a major tech company but hardly apocalyptic like you seem to imply

I agree, should've made that clearer - a 12 or 24-hour outage is bad, but not unprecedented, tech is incredibly complicated and it can happen without any mistakes on Elon's part. Facebook was down for 24 hours in 2019, Roblox was down for three days at some point, etc. The very-bad part is that it's either totally unnecessary (combatting scraping) or they're lying about it (internal outage, GCP issue, etc). When Facebook has a long outage, they have clear updates on the status page every hour. Again, imagine you financially depend on Twitter, just got ratelimited, and now have to look at screenshots of Elon's tweets and guess if he's being honest or not, guess when the ratelimits are disappearing, etc.

And the weirdness of the cause, unfortunately, significantly increases the likelihood of the rate limit persisting.