If you thought your connections from X, the site formerly known as Twitter, to Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, Substack, Reuters and The New York Times had gotten a little slow, it wasn’t a figment of your imagination. . The Washington Post found that X delayed connections to these sites by five seconds.
And five seconds is an eternity on the Internet.
A blink of an eye — 400 milliseconds for technicians — is enough to annoy most users. According to consulting firm Hobo SEO, all it takes is a two-second delay in loading time for 87% of users to abandon a link.
A real commercial poison
That’s why there’s a whole industry that specializes in speeding up connection times. These are CDNs (Content Delivery Network), with companies such as Akamai, CloudFlare and Fastly. Their mission is to ensure that your pages load in less than half a second.
What X has done to these sites is commercial poison. As Sander van Surksum, web performance consultant at Iron/Out, has written, “For businesses, such intentional slowdowns can be catastrophic. In a digital landscape where every second counts, a platform as influential as ‘X’ that holds reins of user access can drastically alter web traffic and, therefore, revenue”.
To do this, X implemented a slowdown in its link-shortening service, t.co. Each time you click on a link on X, it is first processed by t.co. Like most link shortening services, t.co. is used – normally – to help manage internet traffic and to track you on the web. We now know that a site like X can also use it to slow down traffic to a targeted website. To my knowledge, no social network has ever done this before.
Threads referred
It seems that X has been doing this with some sites for weeks. This practice was first reported when a user experienced the delay while trying to access a Meta Threads link shortly after the new social network opened.
On Ycombinator, another user there said: “Go to Twitter and click on a link to any URL on ‘NYTimes.com’ or ‘threads.net’ and you will see a delay of about 5 seconds before t.co is not redirecting you to the correct address”. Twitter doesn’t ban domains it doesn’t like, but just wastes your time if you visit them. The delay is so consistent that it’s obviously deliberate.”
In a statement, the Times said it had “made similar observations” about the systemic delays and had “not received an explanation from the platform about this change.”
Back to normal after a press article
Asked about this information, X replied with a “poo” emoji. Elon Musk himself didn’t answer any questions or mention anything on Twitter about the delays.
However, we know that the sites affected by these delays are the same ones that Musk has in his sights. Many of these sites are, or have been, X customers. And after the Washington Post made the delays public, the sites connected at normal speeds again.
At the same time, X continues to lose money, fails to pay his bills, and is in the process of closing at least one of his sources of income, the promoted accounts. This program allows customers to promote their accounts in order to attract new followers.
Source: “ZDNet.com”