“A small API change had large ramifications,” Twitter CEO Elon Musk wrote in a tweet on Monday, referring to the instrument utilized by third-party builders who run applications that draw on Twitter knowledge and submit to its website. “The code stack is extraordinarily brittle for no good purpose. Will finally want an entire rewrite.”
It was the second time Monday he’d turned to that clarification, each instances calling the location “brittle.”
Since taking on Twitter, CEO Elon Musk has laid off greater than two-thirds of the corporate’s employees, embarking on aggressive cost-cutting and shedding staff partly by compelling them to a decide to an “extraordinarily hardcore” office or go away the corporate. The huge layoffs led to widespread considerations about Twitter’s potential to retain core features, as crucial engineering groups had been diminished to 1 or zero staffers.
Within the months because the takeover — and subsequent layoffs — Twitter has confronted a number of outages, hampering key options: loading tweets and notifications, sending tweets and direct messages, accessing hyperlinks and pictures. Every was stated — by staffers present and former, or Musk himself — to come back as the corporate made adjustments to its code.
“Each mistake in code and operations is now lethal,” a former engineer informed The Washington Publish in November, explaining that these left over had been “going to be overwhelmed, overworked and, due to that, extra prone to make errors.” The previous engineer spoke on the situation of anonymity for concern of retribution.
Earlier than Musk’s takeover, the corporate had a threat analysis staff that vetted product adjustments for anticipated issues. Twitter’s threat analysis course of was geared at flagging potential issues earlier than they arose. However the staff was laid off after Musk’s takeover, The Washington Publish reported, resulting in product rollouts that had been riddled with bugs.
Musk and Twitter didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
Since taking on Twitter, Musk has adopted by with a plan to chop 75 % of the corporate’s employees, aggressively reduce prices and pursued new income streams, equivalent to charging $8 a month for the corporate’s signature blue verification icons. However his tenure has additionally been marked by embarrassing mishaps, such because the botched rollout of the verify mark characteristic, which resulted in a swarm of impersonators and prompted Twitter to quickly pause the subscription service on a number of events.
Musk pursued Twitter pledging to revive “free speech” to the platform, firing the corporate’s earlier slate of managers whom he had blamed for a content material moderation strategy rooted in defending in opposition to the harms of hate speech and misinformation. Musk additionally pledged transparency on the previous regime’s choices — equivalent to the hassle to restrict the unfold of a New York Publish story on the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop computer — however has cracked down on leaks of firm info underneath his personal management.
Even earlier than Musk’s takeover, Twitter workers had warned of the location’s vulnerabilities within the occasion of an outage. Twitter whistleblower Peiter Zatko cautioned a few potential occasion of overlapping outages at Twitter’s off-site knowledge facilities, for instance, in a criticism obtained by congressional committees.
That sort of outage, he stated, might go away crucial knowledge unrecoverable — and trigger Twitter to go down for months. Regardless of the considerations about Twitter’s weak infrastructure, Musk ordered Twitter’s largest knowledge heart, in Sacramento, to be shut down in December, The Washington Publish reported on the time.
On Monday, Twitter customers had been greeted with glitches nearly as quickly as they opened the location.
When customers clicked a hyperlink on Twitter, they had been met with the message: “Your present API plan doesn’t embody entry to this endpoint,” it learn, and directed them to a web page meant for builders.
On the web site Down Detector, which tracks on-line outages, complaints surged: “Person stories point out issues at Twitter,” it stated.
“We made an inside change that had some unintended penalties,” Twitter’s help account stated in a tweet.
By late morning, a few of the features seemed to be restored.
“Issues ought to now be working as regular,” Twitter’s help account stated in a tweet. “Thanks for sticking with us!”
The sample on Monday mirrored an outage from early February, which arose as Twitter was making comparable adjustments to its API, the information feed meant for builders.
Twitter confronted a widespread outage on Feb. 8 that left customers unable to ship tweets and direct messages, observe different accounts and cargo content material of their timelines.
“Beginning February 9, we are going to now not help free entry to the Twitter API, each v2 and v1.1. A paid primary tier can be out there as an alternative,” Twitter wrote that month.
Musk stated Twitter was making an attempt to crack down as a result of Twitter’s freely accessible knowledge was being “abused” by bots peddling scams, however later stated the corporate would make a free model out there, as criticism poured in over his aggressive efforts to monetize elements of the location that had been free earlier than.
That set of issues adopted a widespread world outage Twitter confronted in December.
In group chats amongst present and former engineers on the time, some speculated that the December outage had come after a software program replace gone unsuitable.
Monday wasn’t the primary time Musk urged Twitter’s code wanted to be fully rewritten. He has maintained that stance for months, since taking on the location final 12 months. On a December Twitter Areas, the location’s reside audio characteristic, he stated the corporate’s code base wanted to be overhauled.
Pressed by a participant to clarify what that meant, Musk grew irritated.
“Wonderful, wow,” he stated, after hesitations and pauses. “You’re a jackass. … What a moron.”
