Elon Musk claims Twitter’s new login requirements are a “temporary” response to data scrapers

By early Friday afternoon, internet users noticed that Twitter no longer allowed people to view tweets if they were not logged into the service. At the time, it was difficult to say whether the change was the result of a technical error or a deliberate decision by the company’s management. Later in the day, however, Elon Musk addressed the issue.

“Temporary emergency measure,” he claimed in a tweet. “We were robbed so much that it was degrading service for ordinary users!” Musk later shared more context. “Several hundred organizations (perhaps more) scraped Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it affected the real user experience,” , responding to a tweet from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney lamenting the “increasingly broken” state of the internet. In a separate tweet, discovered by Twitter engineer Aqueel Miqdad the company will reactivate logged-out access “in the near future.”

Of course, without more information, it’s hard to say whether Twitter users are experiencing degraded service because of the data scrapers Musk claims are targeting the platform so aggressively. There isn’t a team at Twitter that Musk’s cost-cutting hasn’t touched. In fact, the group responsible for maintaining the stability of Twitter’s servers has seen its fair share of . In June, the company also had its Google Cloud contract for several months.