Fasten your seat belts, we’re crossing a turbulent zone. Twitter instability persists, with another one-hour outage on Monday, the third in less than a month.
Although Twitter access was not disabled this time, web links, images, lists, or Tweetdeck.com ran into problems with an error message that said, “Your API subscription does not include access to this hotspot.”
“Some Twitter features may not work as expected. We’ve made an internal change that had unintended consequences,” the network said at 6:19 pm PT when many users reported issues. Everything returned to normal after 19:00.
“A small change in the API had a huge impact. The code is very fragile for no good reason. It will have to be completely rewritten,” said Elon Musk.
Termination of free API access
An API is a programming interface that allows third parties (developers, researchers, etc.) to connect to Twitter data, for example, to create bots (automated accounts) and services.
Last month, Twitter announced that it was ending free access to its API, ostensibly to fight spam and hackers, with a basic subscription priced at $100. Faced with the wrath of small developers, Elon Musk partly backed down, ensuring that the basic free access for bots “offering free quality content” is maintained.
Since buying Twitter, Elon Musk has taken very aggressive steps to cut costs. Nearly three out of four employees have been fired or fired. A data center near Sacramento was closed and another one in Atlanta was downsized. According to The Information, Twitter has not paid some of its Amazon Web Services bills.
According to Platformer, on Feb. 8, an employee accidentally deleted the maximum tweets allowed, causing a massive outage that lasted several hours because the team behind those features… no longer exists.