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I'll be concerned if these limits last longer than a couple of days. I doubt the GCP stuff is related (even the article you link connects it to Twitter Trust & Safety while this outage is affecting Twitter's core infra). 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. I suspect someone fucked up deploying the new login-wall and they're running damage control, and possibly using the situation to run some experiments (or as leverage for their negotiations with API customers). This is the first major service interruption since Musk's takeover and (unless it persists!) I really think you're catastrophizing too much. I mean, Reddit was completely unusable for several days just a couple of weeks ago (though that was due to managerial incompetence rather than technical); 12 hours of degraded service is a bad look for a major tech company but hardly apocalyptic like you seem to imply.
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
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.
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