On March 6, 2023 we witnessed a serious drop in Twitter that it lasted quite some time and that there seemed to be no clear explanation for its collapse, not even for Elon Musk, other than that it had some relationship with the API.
Those who were affected remembered the good old days of the social network with its Fail Whaleonly this time the failures were presented in the most random ways.
Clicking on the links was of no use, they just wouldn’t open. When trying to publish something, users were faced with an error window with the legend that “your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint”.
The images were still not loaded, although the quadrants of the same were delimited in the tweets that were barely visible. TweetDeck it fell completely and was unusable for a long time.
All this wave of events was experienced for a couple of hours that day, March 6. Then, out of nowhere, everything was back to order. Although not many explanations were ever given about what really happened.
Today the supposed story behind all these problems is finally known.
Elon Musk raged after Twitter went down over a single employee
A report from friends of The Vergewith information based on data provided by anonymous employees aware of the incident, detail the degree of depth and sensitivity that the massive dismissals of Musk have had for the stability of Twitter.
At the time, the official technical support account offered very vague details on the matter. Claiming that “some parts of Twitter were not working as expected” due to an internal change that had “some unintended consequences”:
Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences. We’re working on this now and will share an update when it’s fixed.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) March 6, 2023
After a couple of hours everything was fixed in theory, but it’s only now that the site has leaked the story behind the whole thing. Where Elon Musk’s downsizing would be so extreme that a single employee was left behind as an API manager who is migrating to become a paid item.
As the sole culprit, he had no team to help him or oversee the criteria for his modifications, so the engineer made an “incorrect configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,” a current Twitter employee reveals.
Elon Musk would have been furious, as that change set off a chain reaction that brought everything to a crash. But he himself was the one who dismembered that crucial area for Twitter.