Image Credit: Cbsnews
When Elon Musk blamed yesterday’s outage on code that was “extremely brittle for no good reason,” he ignored the effect his widespread layoffs had on Twitter’s capacity to maintain the website.
As a result of “an internal change that had some unintended consequences,” links and other functionality were broken for about an hour, according to Twitter. The Platformer article claims that this modification was made as part of a plan to stop allowing free access to the Twitter API.
The following error message appeared when links were clicked during the outage: “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.” The error message prompted widespread speculation that the issue was caused by Musk’s choice to charge for API access, and Platformer’s reporting seems to support that theory.
The bigger issue, however, is Musk’s cost-cutting, which has seen Twitter’s staff drop from 7,500 to under 2,000. According to Platformer’s report, Twitter employs fewer than 550 full-time engineers.
Image Credit: ripplesnigeria
The risk assessment team was fired.
Musk’s explanation of the “brittle” code was only partially supported by one employee. The employee told Platformer that because of the tech debt left over from Twitter 1.0, any changes would immediately result in catastrophic failure. Musk previously stated that the entire code base needs to be “completely rewritten.”
Less technical staff, however, makes it more difficult to guarantee that changes won’t impair current functionality and increases the amount of time required to fix the issues that result. Another worker explained to Platformer that this is what happens when you fire 90% of the workforce. Musk has been requesting the prompt implementation of significant changes.
Also Read: Former Google Engineer Concerns About the Hazards of AI Chatbots
The employee unintentionally deleted data.
A glitch that prevented many users from tweeting or messaging one another occurred in early February after a Twitter employee deleted data from an internal service meant to prevent spam. An engineer testing a change to people’s Twitter profiles on Apple mobile devices led to another brief outage a week later,” the NYT reported. “The engineer ignored a past practice of rolling out new features to many users without testing them first, according to two people familiar with the change. The change was a modification to Spaces, Twitter’s live audio service.”
“Welp, I just accidentally took down Twitter,” the engineer, Leah Culver, tweeted on February 15. “You can blame @elonmusk if you like though. 🫠”
Culver became a part of it when Twitter acquired Breaker, a social podcast app company she co-founded, in early 2021. Culver explained why she continued to work at Musk’s Twitter even after many of her co-workers were fired in a thread she posted in December 2022.
