Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk who recently acquired Twitter said on the social media platform, Twitter is very slow in India, Indonesia and many other countries, adding that “this is fact and not claim”. The Twitter CEO also informed that 10 to 15 seconds to refresh homeline tweets is common but it sometimes doesn’t work at all, especially on the android phones. 

According to Musk, the same application, Twitter in the United States takes about two seconds to refresh, but nearly 20 seconds in India, due to bad batching/verbose comms and also because the actual useful data transferred is low. In addition to this, Musk replied to a tweet by artificial intelignece expert Mike Schroepfer, who explained the former’s claim on Twitter load time in India being 20 seconds. The former chief technology officer of Meta attributed the time to 1200 remote procedural calls.

In another tweet, 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.

Remote Procedure Call is a technique for constructing distributed, client-server based applications. A software communication protocol that one program can use to request a service from a program located in another computer on a network without having to understand the network’s details, RPC is used to call other processes on the remote systems like a local system.

Several Android developers and coders outside of Twitter have also countered Musk’s claims, pointing out that other factors like ‘edge caching’ and ‘service availability’ could be influencing the speed of apps like Twitter in regions like India.

Elon Musk took over Twitter last month. The 51-year-old billionaire has brought in a few changes to Twitter, including a monthly payment for blue tick verification of Twitter profiles, an official label for select verified accounts and adding long-form text to tweets. Musk also has plans to take an action on bot accounts.