Yesterday’s massive Twitter outage was provoked by just one technician

On the eve of Twitter, an error appeared, as a result of which the platform users stopped loading the publications feed, and also had problems opening external and internal links. The problem was caused by the actions of just one engineer and there is reason to believe that such errors are systemic.

Image source: Fotomix / pixabay.com

As a result, there was a widespread, albeit relatively short-lived, disruption in the work of the social network “wrong configuration change”which “essentially broke the Twitter API”. The failure was related to the implementation of the project to block free access to the API became known The edge. The bugs manifested themselves in several ways: users couldn’t follow external links, images and the publish feed stopped loading, and the company’s professional TweetDeck client didn’t work.

However, the Twitter administration acknowledged the problem formulated Their reasons are a bit vague: “Currently, some parts of Twitter may not work as expected. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences.”. The company’s owner and boss, Elon Musk, was reportedly furious and wanted to hide the reasons for the failure not: “A small API change had a big impact. The code stack is extremely vulnerable for no good reason. As a result, a complete overhaul is required.”.

Image source: twitter.com/elonmusk

In 2023 alone, there were at least five outages on the social network:

• On January 23, Android app users temporarily lost the ability to download and post new tweets;
• On February 8th, users were shown a mass message stating that they had “exceeded the daily limit for sending tweets” and the ability to post had been disabled;
• February 15, tweets stopped loading;
• On February 18, the publication feed download was interrupted;
• On March 1, the tape stopped working.

Company employees are understanding of the current situation: the problems date back to when Twitter was not yet part of Elon Musk. Some of the platform code is out of date, and the system sometimes becomes unnecessarily tedious to respond to even minor changes.