Elon Musk accidentally blocked thousands of legitimate Twitter users when he tried to block Twitter bots.

Musk at a 2022 Halloween party. Taylor Hill/Getty Images
Twitter blocked 30 mobile carriers because of Elon Musk’s bot fear, Platformer reports. However, staff rushed to reverse this ban after top telecom companies received complaints.

Platformer reported that Elon Musk accidentally blocked Twitter users. The platform had denied access to hundreds, thousands of accounts to try to reduce bot numbers.

Around midnight on Saturday, the second-richest person in the world tweeted: “The bots will surprise tomorrow.”

Hours later, all major telecom providers in India (and Russia) were blocked from Twitter.

Musk’s effort to reduce spam led to the exclusion of approximately 30 mobile carriers – mainly from eastern Asia – from the app.

Platformer reported that Twitter instead of identifying individual accounts identified mobile networks associated with large bots networks.

It blocked the first SMS messages that were used for two-factor authentication before blocking access to Twitter.

Musk’s concerns about bots were a major issue when he attempted to pull out from the deal to buy Twitter this summer. His lawyers also claimed that Twitter was concealing staff responsible for calculating the number of accounts that were bots.

Musk’s data scientists confirmed that he had falsely claimed that 20% of users were spammers or fakes. However, Musk’s data scientists have found the exact opposite.

Sunday’s ban lasted just over an hour before telecom companies transferred customer complaints to the social network.

Platformer reported that a Twitter engineer shared an e-mail from one of the companies on the company’s Slack. One employee stated that he expected more emails from the companies to reach his peering queue tomorrow.

Another responded: “We blocked quite a few large carriers, so I would have expected that.”

Telecommunication companies were informed that the problem was caused by “routing configuration modifications” but Twitter staff quickly removed the block.

Platformer reported that Musk also required employees to explain how a particular account was able to impersonate his character. Because it was verified, the hacked account could share crypto scams.

One employee stated that Twitter’s content moderation tool, which was used to detect spam, “has been unstable for at most a week now.”

Twitter didn’t immediately respond to Insider’s request.

Business Insider has the original article.
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By: psyme@insider.com (Pete Syme)
Title: Elon Musk tried to get rid of Twitter bots by blocking hundreds of thousands of accounts, but accidentally impacted many legitimate users
Sourced From: www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-accidentally-blocked-thousands-of-twitter-users-bot-cull-2022-12
Published Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2022 13:11:42 +0000