“A small API change had huge ramifications,” Twitter CEO Elon Musk wrote in a tweet on Monday, referring to the device utilized by third-party builders who run packages that draw on Twitter knowledge and publish to its web site. “The code stack is extraordinarily brittle for no good cause. Will in the end want a whole rewrite.”
It was the second time Monday he’d turned to that rationalization, 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 employees partly by compelling them to a decide to an “extraordinarily hardcore” office or depart the corporate. The huge layoffs led to widespread considerations about Twitter’s means to retain core capabilities, as critical engineering groups have been decreased to at least one 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 images. Every was mentioned — by staffers present and former, or Musk himself — to come back as the corporate made modifications to its code.
“Each mistake in code and operations is now lethal,” a former engineer advised The Washington Submit in November, explaining that these left over have been “going to be overwhelmed, overworked and, due to that, extra more likely to make errors.” The previous engineer spoke on the situation of anonymity for worry of retribution.
Earlier than Musk’s takeover, the corporate had a threat analysis crew that vetted product modifications for anticipated issues. Twitter’s threat analysis course of was geared at flagging potential issues earlier than they arose. However the crew was laid off after Musk’s takeover, The Washington Submit reported, resulting in product rollouts that have been riddled with bugs.
Musk and Twitter didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
Since taking on Twitter, Musk has followed through with a plan to chop 75 p.c of the corporate’s employees, aggressively minimize prices and pursued new income streams, reminiscent of 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 function, which resulted in a swarm of impersonators and prompted Twitter to briefly 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 towards the harms of hate speech and misinformation. Musk additionally pledged transparency on the previous regime’s selections — reminiscent of the hassle to limit the unfold of a New York Submit 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 couple of potential occasion of overlapping outages at Twitter’s off-site knowledge facilities, for instance, in a criticism obtained by congressional committees.
That kind of outage, he said, may depart important 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 Submit reported on the time.
On Monday, Twitter customers have been greeted with glitches nearly as quickly as they opened the location.
When customers clicked a hyperlink on Twitter, they have 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 supposed for builders.
On the web site Down Detector, which tracks on-line outages, complaints surged: “Person stories point out issues at Twitter,” it mentioned.
“We made an inside change that had some unintended penalties,” Twitter’s assist account said in a tweet.
By late morning, a number of the capabilities seemed to be restored.
“Issues ought to now be working as regular,” Twitter’s assist account mentioned in a tweet. “Thanks for sticking with us!”
The sample on Monday mirrored an outage from early February, which arose as Twitter was making related modifications to its API, the information feed supposed 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’ll now not assist free entry to the Twitter API, each v2 and v1.1. A paid primary tier will likely be obtainable as an alternative,” Twitter wrote that month.
Musk mentioned Twitter was attempting to crack down as a result of Twitter’s freely accessible knowledge was being “abused” by bots peddling scams, however later mentioned the corporate would make a free model obtainable, as criticism poured in over his aggressive efforts to monetize elements of the location that have been free earlier than.
That set of issues adopted a widespread international 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 fallacious.
Monday wasn’t the primary time Musk instructed Twitter’s code wanted to be completely 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 function, he mentioned the corporate’s code base wanted to be overhauled.
Pressed by a participant to elucidate what that meant, Musk grew irritated.
“Superb, wow,” he said, after hesitations and pauses. “You’re a jackass. … What a moron.”
