Elon Musk accidentally blocked thousands of Twitter users while trying to cull bots: Report

Last weekend Elon Musk asked Twitter staff to explain why a tweet about a crypto scam, shared from a profile impersonating him, had not been identified as such by the company’s systems.

Elon Musk mistakenly blocked thousands of real Twitter users as the social media platform tried to reduce bot numbers, Platformer reported.

On Sunday, the world's second-richest person tweeted: "The bots are in for a surprise tomorrow." Hours later, the main telecom providers in India and Russia, and Indonesia were blocked from Twitter. In all, traffic from 30 telecom networks across the world was blocked.

The bots are in for a surprise tomorrow

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2022

Almost immediately, as legitimate users found they were unable to access the platform, complaints began to flow in.

According to Platformer, a Twitter engineer shared an email from one telecom provider on Slack messaging service that stated that users were complaining that Twitter had stopped working. “I expect more emails like this to hit our peering queue tomorrow,” the publication quoted an employee as saying. “We blocked a fair few [sic] huge carriers, so I would expect so,” another added.

Twitter quickly unblocked the carriers, and told them the service issues were due to “routing configuration changes.”

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In another incident, last weekend Elon Musk asked Twitter staff to explain why a tweet about a crypto scam, shared from a profile impersonating him, had not been identified as such by the company’s systems, Platformer reported.

“I believe it is because this account is legacy verified,” an employee explained in Slack. They later added: “The legacy verified account was hacked”. The account was then locked and Musk's picture removed from the profile.

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