Unraveling Twitter outage: A story of layoffs and technical failures
Outages have become a norm at Twitter. The social media platform is going down in ways no one imagined. The latest outage was the strangest of the lot. On Monday, some Twitter users found issues with links, while for others, images wouldn't load throughout their timelines. The outage was steeped in Elon Musk's job cuts and issues that predate Musk's takeover of the company.
Users were not able to open links
Many Twitter users clicking links within tweets did not reach any further than an error message that said, "Your API plan does not include access to this endpoint." Images did not load for some, while others could not access TweetDeck, the client for professional users. Thousands of users in India were among those who reported issues with Twitter.
An 'internal change' led to the outage
The error message was strange. But what was even stranger was Twitter's explanation for the same. "Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We're working on this now and will share an update when it's fixed," the microblogging site's support account tweeted. Per Platformer, the "internal change" was related to the shutdown of free access to Twitter's API.
Only one reliability engineer was tasked with the API project
Twitter recently decided to close free access to its API and introduce a paid tier to boost the company's revenue. According to Platformer, only one reliability engineer was tasked with the project, indicating how steep Musk's job cuts have been. The said engineer was responsible for the outage, as they made a "bad configuration change" that broke the Twitter API, an employee told Platformer.
Musk was furious about the situation
The engineer's mistake led to Twitter crumbling like a house of cards. Most of the platform's internal tools and public-facing APIs were brought down. Engineers scrambled to get things under control. Musk, as expected, was furious about the situation. "A small API change had massive ramifications," he later tweeted. He blamed Twitter's code stack for the issue.
Twitter's code stack is 'extremely brittle': Musk
"The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite," Musk said. Some current employees of the company are also of the opinion that some of Twitter's technical issues predate Musk. "There's so much tech debt from Twitter 1.0 that if you make a change right now, everything breaks," an employee told Platformer.
Nonstop layoffs have left the company vulnerable to outages
The technical debt from Twitter 1.0 must be blamed for the platform's constant outages. Nonstop layoffs under Musk should be condemned in the same breath. The company only has 550 full-time engineers now, making it extremely vulnerable to outages. There have been at least six outages this year alone. A single engineer on a major project says a lot about the state of affairs.
Twitter employees have become 'numb' to outages
What is interesting is that employees at Twitter have become accustomed to catastrophic outages. "This type of outage has become so frequent that I think we're all numb to it," an employee told Platformer. "This is what happens when you fire 90 percent of the company," another employee said, pointing to the time it took to fix the issue.
