The company is facing financial and regulatory pressures, which have set the backdrop for its sixth failure this year
Twitter experienced its sixth outage this year on Monday, where any link clicked on the platform resulted in an error message and new image posts only showed a blank box. This outage was different from the previous four that occurred in February and March as the site was not entirely unavailable, allowing users to discuss the ongoing issues. The only other outage this year, in January, only impacted Android users. Following Monday’s outage, Twitter’s trending topics were filled with phrases related to the issue as users speculated that it was caused by Elon Musk’s demands.
According to the error message, the Twitter API, which permits other programs to engage with the platform, was the cause of the issue. Back in January, without any warning, the company prohibited third-party apps from using the API, which caused them to stop working all of a sudden. The error message implied that Twitter had been making changes to the API and had inadvertently banned its own applications during the process.
As per a report in the Platformer newsletter, only one reliability engineer was assigned to develop a paid version of the API project, and that individual unintentionally introduced a faulty modification to the live site without realizing its consequences.
While mistakes are a part of life, Twitter is not the only company to face downtime due to the actions of a single engineer. In 2021, Facebook’s services were down for almost six hours after accidentally deleting itself from the internet’s “phone book.” However, with the frequency of outages at Twitter increasing over time, some have begun to question whether these occasional errors are becoming a more systemic issue.
Twitter’s rewrite effort will have to contend with other demands on the company’s resources. As per a Financial Times report on Tuesday, the EU has asked Musk to employ additional moderation experts to adhere to the new social media platform regulations. Furthermore, the US Federal Trade Commission is investigating the company, expressing concerns that Twitter’s capacity to safeguard its users may have been impacted by layoffs. After Musk’s $44bn (£37bn) acquisition of Twitter in October of last year, the workforce has shrunk from 7,500 employees to roughly 2,000.
Musk issued an apology on Tuesday to a Twitter employee with whom he had a disagreement regarding the employee’s employment status. During the exchange, Musk made a remark about Haraldur Thorleifsson’s disability being an “excuse” for his work performance. However, Musk later apologized to Thorleifsson for any misunderstanding that arose from his tweets and stated that Thorleifsson is now contemplating remaining with the company.
Twitter is facing resistance to its cost-cutting measures, which have resulted in the company ceasing to pay for office space, janitorial supplies, and web hosting. The company has faced challenges in negotiations for a discount on its cloud computing with Amazon Web Services, which it stepped back from to avoid further conflict. Similarly, a dispute with Salesforce resulted in the disabling of Twitter’s Slack communications platform for a weekend in February, impeding staff collaboration.
These engineering challenges are occurring as Twitter faces financial pressures, having taken on $13bn in debt as part of Musk’s funding package for the takeover. As a result, the company must make quarterly interest payments of approximately $300m.
