Twitter is very slow in India: Elon Musk

Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, said that the microblogging platform is very slow in India, Indonesia and many other countries.

"10 to 15 secs to refresh homeline tweets is common. Sometimes, it doesn't work at all, especially on Android phones… Only question is how much delay is due to bandwidth/latency/app," Musk wrote in a tweet.

Musk had earlier apologised for Twitter being super slow in many countries. Same app in the US takes around 2 seconds to refresh, but around 20 seconds in India, "due to bad batching and verbose comms", Musk had said.

On Wednesday, Musk said he is "punting relaunch of Blue Verified" to November 29 to make sure that it is rock solid. "With new release, changing your verified name will cause loss of checkmark until name is confirmed by Twitter to meet Terms of Service," he said, adding that all unpaid legacy Blue checkmarks will be removed in a few months.

These comments come days after Twitter suspended its new verification scheme which allows anyone to buy a blue check mark. Twitter's $8 blue tick subscription wiped out billions of dollars from Eli Lilly's market cap after their official Twitter handles were impersonated to spread disinformation. On November 11, US pharma giant Eli Lilly apologised for a misleading tweet from a fake Eli Lilly account which said, "We are excited to announce insulin is free now."

To crack down on fake verified accounts, Twitter will soon enable organisations to identify which other Twitter accounts are actually associated with them.

"We will enable organizations to manage affiliations," Musk had said, adding that increasing granularity about what "verified" actually means is the right move.

To distinguish parody accounts, Musk had said that accounts engaged in parody must include "parody" in their name, not just in bio. "To be more precise, accounts doing parody impersonations. Basically, tricking people is not ok," Musk had said.

Last week, Twitter India users received pop-ups on their Apple App Store, asking them to buy the famed Blue checkmark and a host of other features for ₹719 per month. At ₹719 (around $8.8), the feature turns out to be more expensive in India than the developed economies, where it's priced $8 per month. This is contrary to what Twitter's new chief had promised earlier. Musk had said that 'Blue' subscription will not be the same across countries and that the price will be adjusted by country proportionate to "purchasing power parity". Twitter Blue also offers features like fewer ads, the option to post longer videos and priority ranking for quality content.