The health of Twitter’s technical infrastructure has never looked so fragile. It must be said that since the beginning of 2023, and more generally since Elon Musk took power, the American social network has had a series of disappointments. At least six major outages have been documented in the past three months, ranging from an inability to refresh its News Feed to an inability to post new tweets. On Monday March 6, a new outage affected the social network, preventing the opening of links to external sites and not allowing images to be loaded. According to some analysts, the cause is to be found in the company’s insufficient workforce.
According to Platformer, the outage, caused by manipulation by an engineer, was part of a plan to shut down free access to the Twitter API announced on February 1. Problem: it would be the only reliability engineer of the site having been assigned to this project with complex ramifications, reports the media. It’s a “bad config change” Who “basically broke the Twitter API”, explains an employee who wished to remain anonymous. And like a game of dominoes, the fall of one tool caused the others to fall. “This is what happens when you fire 90% of the company”quipped another Twitter employee to our colleagues.
The ongoing layoffs would have left the company with fewer than 550 full-time engineers, according to Platformer’s sources, obviously making the network more vulnerable to outages. For his part, Elon Musk pointed to the dilapidated state of the platform. “A small API change had massive ramificationsElon Musk said in a tweet. The code is extremely fragile for no good reason and will eventually need a complete rewrite”. An opinion, however, shared by some employees, who mention a “tech debt” inherited from older versions of Twitter.