Twitter experienced a new fall in the Musk era, although this timeit would have been an engineer’s fault. A report of Platformer indicates that the bug that affected the web and other applications was due to plans to cut free access to the API. A reliability engineer in charge of the project made an incorrect configuration change that ended up breaking the Twitter API.
Information, medium filtered by employees of the social network, hinted that the bug affected not only users, but multiple teams within the company. Several workers reported on Slack that all of Twitter was down, as settings were uploaded to part of the internal tools. He incident angered Elon Muskwho would later show his face to justify what happened.
“A small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Ultimately it will need a complete rewrite.” said the tycoon in a tweet. This sentiment is shared by most of the engineers still working at the company. The falls have become the daily bread And it’s not all Elon Musk’s fault, but code from more than ten years ago.
“This type of outage has become so prevalent that I think we’re all numb,” one employee said. “There is so much tech debt from Twitter 1.0 that if you make a change right now, everything breaks,” another worker mentioned. The current situation is critical and proof of this is that today’s fall It is the sixth major ruling so far this year.
Elon Musk is unable to transform Twitter
When Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for $43 billion, he endorsed his intention to make it a platform where free speech reigned. for months He dedicated himself to pointing out all the problems that reigned in the social network — both technical and at the managerial level — promising changes once he took command. The expected day arrived, and instead of implementing a strategy to transform the company, he ended up laying off more than half of his staff.
Today’s incident, like the glitches in the timeline and mentions that occurred in February, or the problems in the Android app are the result of a company that operates with the least amount of resources. As reported by Twitter employees, only one reliability engineer is in charge of the API project. This is important, as an unexpected adjustment ends up breaking the platform and it can take hours for it to be resolved.
The lack of personnel also affects the relationship with the developers or the users of Twitter themselves. Although the company confirmed the rulingthe service status website did not report any incidents. The absence of a communication department is evident, since the only way to find out is through Elon’s tweets.
The API change that broke Twitter is part of a push to limit free access. Elon and company plan a payment API and restricted access for Twitter Blue members. The problem is that no one would want to pay eight dollars (or more) a month for an unreliable product that every week experiences problems.