Elon Musk removed the ability to register on Twitter for Ukrainians
On December 13, Ukrainians cannot register on Twitter. All because of Elon Musk, who announced a “surprise for bots” the day before.
What is the problem and how did it happen that subscribers of Ukrainian mobile operators cannot become part of the social network – read further in our material.
What happened to Twitter
On Tuesday, Ukrainians began to complain that they could not log into Twitter using their mobile number.
The thing is that the company has stopped sending two-factor authentication codes.
At most, Ukrainian subscribers of Kyivstar, Vodafone and Lifecell operators cannot register on the social network either.
The team of UNITED24.media – a state media that covers the truth about the war in Ukraine and Russian aggression for the whole world – has already drawn attention to this problem.
“Hello, Elon Musk. It seems that a Ukrainian number is no longer possible for verifying a Twitter account and two-factor authentication. Ukraine is not on your list of countries. It is vital for us to continue to show the world what is happening in our country,” said the address to the owner of the social network.
Hey @elonmusk, it seems like it's no longer possible to have a Ukrainian number verify a Twitter account/two-factor authentication. Ukraine is not in your list of countries, see our screenshot.
It's vital for us to keep showing the world what's going on in our country. pic.twitter.com/XQl0PAQvYU
— UNITED24.media (@United24media) December 13, 2022
Meanwhile, Russian numbers remain in the “correct” list and can be safely used now for login and registration…
Why did this happen?
Apparently, the failure on Twitter is directly related to the “war against bots” announced by Musk a few days ago.
On December 11, the billionaire warned that “bots are in for a surprise.”
The bots are in for a surprise tomorrow
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2022
And within hours of this tweet, Musk’s company blocked the traffic of approximately 30 mobile operators around the world. The countries of the Asia-Pacific region suffered the most from this action.
“The project was part of Elon Musk’s effort to rid Twitter of spam. But instead of working to remove individual offenders, the company simply identified mobile networks associated with large spam networks in certain countries and blocked subscribers of those networks, depriving them of first to receive SMS messages from Twitter. And then the company completely blocked traffic from these operators,” writes the authoritative publication Platformer, which covers news from Silicon Valley.
The company later unblocked most mobile carriers and told them the service issues were due to “routing configuration changes.”
But, as we can see, Twitter engineers have not yet reached Ukraine, because the problem remains relevant.
But that’s not all
It is interesting that Twitter “fumbled” not only with registration and two-step verification of users.
Users also complain about other anomalies in the social network. In particular, some have arbitrarily changed the location in the profile.
Even the official account of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway, as well as the profiles of the Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of this country, became a “victim”.
Yes, the Norwegian ministry’s account suddenly became administered by… the Nigerian government.
“Despite our excellent bilateral relations and close alphabetical neighborhood with Nigeria, we would greatly appreciate it if you could call us Norway,” Norwegian government officials told the Twitter support team.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk himself does not comment on the situation in any way.
But the eccentric businessman publishes funny (as he thinks) memes.
However, so far it looks like Musk is “burying” not bots, but the company he recently acquired and which many predict will fail with a leader like Elon…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 12, 2022
