Web links that direct users to other pages and content on the Internet were down for half an hour around 6:00 pm Monday on Twitter. Elon Musk’s social network has been clinging to glitches for weeks now.
Twitter, whose workforce has been drastically cut by the multibillionaire, has previously warned of a risk of disruption following “internal changes”. Elon Musk said during the outage that the platform is “fragile”.
“Currently, some aspects of Twitter may not work as expected,” the official @TwitterSupport account said at 6:20 p.m. Monday morning in San Francisco.
Some parts of Twitter may not work as expected. We’ve made an internal change that had some unintended consequences. We are working on it now and will share an update when it is fixed.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) March 6, 2023
Half an hour later, the links started working again and the reports on the Downdetector specialized site dropped, having already accumulated more than 8,000.
Second crash in a week
At the time of the crash, the links led to a blank page with a short message at the top: “Your current API (programming interface) does not enable access to this page.” Last month, the California-based company announced that access to its API would soon stop being free. The API is the interface that the platform provides to IT developers to create tools for this service, like Tweetdeck in the case of Twitter: “A small change in the API can have a big impact. The architecture of computer code is extremely fragile for no apparent reason. At some point, it will have to be completely rewritten,” Elon Musk justifies in his tweet.
Last week, Twitter users were having trouble loading part of their news feed. Some received a “Welcome to Twitter” message instead of the normal “Follow” tab feed, while the “For You” section loaded fine.
Elon Musk, already the head of Tesla and SpaceX, bought Twitter in late October for $44 billion. He fired half the staff immediately and has continued to fire many engineers ever since to save money.
Turnover decreased by 40%
The New York Times and other trade publications estimate that the San Francisco-based company now has fewer than 2,000 employees, up from 7,500 four months ago. The social network, which had more than 368 million monthly users globally last year, will lose about 32 million between 2022 and 2024 due to the spread of toxic content or an increase in disruptions, according to Insider Intelligence.
With many advertisers gone, the social network’s turnover and adjusted profits were down about 40% year-on-year in December, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday, citing people close to the case.
with agencies