Twitter suffers another outage due to one of its developers

on March 6 in the evening, Twitter suffered a crash. As a result of the outage, users of the platform stopped loading the feed of publications, and also had problems opening external and internal links. As it turned out, the problem was caused by the actions of only one engineer. According to an anonymous Twitter employee, the developer made a «bad configuration change» that «essentially broke the Twitter API.» However, the social networking site’s community started talking about the systemic nature of the recent problems on the platform.

The malfunctions manifested themselves in different ways: users lost the ability to follow external links, images and the publication feed stopped loading, and the professional TweetDeck client did not work.

The Twitter administration recognized the problem, although the reasons for it were unclear: «Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences.» The company’s CEO Elon Musk was more specific: «A minor API change has had serious consequences. The code stack is extremely fragile for no good reason. As a result, a complete redesign will be required.»

A small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason.

Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 6, 2023

It is worth noting that this year alone, the social network has experienced at least five failures:

• on January 23, users of the Twitter app on Android temporarily lost the ability to upload and publish new tweets;
• on February 8, users were massively notified that they had «exceeded the daily tweet limit» and the ability to post was disabled;
• on February 15, tweets were not uploaded;
• on February 18, the feed of publications was interrupted;
• on March 1, the feed did not work at all.

The company’s employees are sympathetic to the situation and claim that the problems date back to the days when Twitter was not owned by Elon Musk. The developers explain that part of the platform’s code is outdated, and the system sometimes reacts to even minor changes.