Il Twitter website had several problems yesterday – and it seems that only one engineer is to blame. Or rather, an iengineer left alone. Indeed, while the company was able to recover from its latest outage in a couple of hours, the story behind the outages suggests that there will be more in the future. Why after i layoffs wanted by Elon Muskthere are not enough human resources to manage the social network.
Twitter and the problems due to an engineer – left alone
On Monday morning, Twitter users were faced with a number of problems. Clicking on the links would no longer open: instead a mysterious error message would appear saying “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint“. Images would no longer load and other users were reporting problems logging into TweetDeck, Twitter’s client for professionals.
Chaos has spread across the timeline, with users having vehemently tweeted about the outage. Indeed, many also shared images of the disservice. Which no one could see because they didn’t load.
The company explained “Some parts of Twitter may not work as intended at this time. We have made an internal change that has had some unintended consequences.”
The change in question was part of a project for delete the free access to the Twitter API. On February 1, the company announced it would no longer support free access to its API — no more free access for web and app developers. Instead, the company has begun building a new paid API for programmers.
But according to reports from The Verge, only one site engineer was put in charge of the project. On Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “essentially broke the Twitter API,” according to a current employee.
The change had cascading consequences within the company. And it took down a lot of Twitter’s internal tools along with the public APIs. Musk era furioso, as reported by several sources.
“A small API change had huge consequences“, ha Musk tweeted later. “The code stack is extremely fragile for no good reason. It’s going to need a complete rewrite eventually.”
Some current engineers agree with the fact that the app code needs to be reviewed. Above all to bring the performance improvements that Musk has been promising for some time. But constant layoffs have left the company with less than 550 full-time engineers. Impossible not to link this data to the latest problems and crashes of the app.
An engineer, remaining anonymous, comments: “This is what happens when you fire 90% of the company.”