Twitter Is Very Slow In India, Says Elon Musk

Elon Musk said he would 'like to apologise for Twitter being super slow in many countries'. 

Tesla CEO and owner of Twitter Elon Musk

Source : Getty Images

Elon Musk on Tuesday said Twitter was "very slow" in India and many other countries. Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion in late October, said Twitter in India was slow "even on latest iPhone".

"Twitter is very slow in India, Indonesia and many other countries. This is a fact, not a 'claim'. 10 to 15 secs to refresh homeline tweets is common. Sometimes, it doesn't work at all, especially on Android phones. The only question is how much delay is due to bandwidth/latency/app," Musk tweeted.

"Worth noting that Twitter in India and many other countries is slow even on latest iPhone," Musk said.

"There are ~1200 'microservices' server side, of which ~40 are critical to Twitter working at all, according to server control team. Trimming down that 1200 number, reducing data usage, serialized trips and simplifying app are all needed to improve speed of use," the Tesla and SpaceX CEO further said.

In another tweet, Musk said, "Same app in the US takes ~2 secs to refresh (too long), but ~20 secs in India, due to bad batching/verbose comms. Actually useful data transferred is low.

Earlier, Musk said he would "like to apologise for Twitter being super slow in many countries". 

"The app is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline! I was told ~1200 RPCs independently by several engineers at Twitter, which matches # of microservices. The ex-employee is wrong," he said.

Musk's remark comes after he fired a member of Twitter's Android app developer team via a tweet. Eric Frohnhoefer was fired after he tweeted that Musk's assessment of Twitter being slow as the app was doing ">1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render timelines" was wrong. 

Eric cited Musk's tweet and wrote, "I've spent ~6 years working on Twitter for Android and I can say that this is wrong."