Twitter had shed greater than two-thirds of its workers since Elon Musk took over the corporate final yr, and the steep cuts have led many to surprise how long the location might proceed functioning usually — and what may occur if technical issues arose.
On Wednesday, that concern grew to become the truth as Twitter stated it was working internally to get the issues mounted. “Sorry for the difficulty. We’re conscious and dealing to get this mounted,” it tweeted.
Makes an attempt to ship tweets had been met with messages studying: “You might be over the day by day restrict for sending tweets.” Past posting tweets, customers reported an incapability to ship direct messages, observe different accounts, and cargo content material on their timelines.
testing 1 2 3 ?️ is that this factor on?
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) February 8, 2023
The web site Down Detector, which tracks outages based mostly on consumer studies, stated: “Consumer studies point out issues at Twitter.”
Whereas some tweets continued to load, many had been from customers who found a workaround to ship their posts: scheduling tweets upfront.
A few of the capabilities seemed to be coming again late Wednesday afternoon, because the outage had stretched over an hour. However the issues continued for a lot of — as customers refreshed the location to seek out their notifications weren’t loading and older tweets had been populating their timelines.
Musk’s layoffs, and the fallout from an inner ultimatum urging workers to decide to an “extraordinarily hardcore” Twitter or depart their jobs, led to feverish speculation in regards to the downfall of Twitter. As hundreds departed the company after refusing to decide to Musk’s pledge, many departments — together with people who deal with core capabilities — had been short-staffed, down to 2, one or zero remaining employees.
Musk bought the location for $44 billion in October, pledging to revive “free speech” and deal with points similar to spam and bots, as he heaped criticism on the prior administration’s method to content material moderation.
Twitter will not be working as anticipated for a few of you. Sorry for the difficulty. We’re conscious and dealing to get this mounted.
— Twitter Assist (@TwitterSupport) February 8, 2023
A congressional oversight committee held hearings on Wednesday regarding allegations that Twitter’s earlier workers made choices favorable to Democrats within the 2020 elections. On the listening to, power briefly went out on Capitol Hill.
Even earlier than Musk’s takeover, workers had raised concerns about Twitter’s resilience within the occasion of outages. Twitter’s off-site knowledge facilities had been highlighted as a significant vulnerability.
In a criticism obtained by congressional committees, whistleblower Peiter Zatko, for instance, raised the prospect of overlapping outages at Twitter’s knowledge facilities that might depart it unable to appropriately restart its servers. Such an outage, he stated, might result in a lack of vital knowledge and depart the service down for months.