WaPo article: https://archive.is/wip/sgViP
Company owner Elon Musk tweeted that the change was a “temporary emergency measure” to deter third-party scraping of data from the social media platform. “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk wrote.
User "elonmusk" not found
Good god! Where is this happening?
Worldwide. Twitter has replaced a whole load of services that companies would have to host themselves and pay the bandwidth and storage costs for. Instead, Twitter pays for it. Now Elon's had enough of their freeloading and so if you don't have a Twitter account, you can't get news, service updates or timely customer services from these companies.