On Monday, numerous Twitter users experienced issues when trying to access links both on the platform and other external websites. This disruption came before the company, owned by Elon Musk, announced that it had rectified the issue, marking another instance in a series of outages.
Musk attributed the outage to a minor modification in Twitter’s data-access tool. He tweeted that “the code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason” and indicated that a comprehensive rewrite would ultimately be necessary.
Downdetector, a website that monitors outages, recorded over 8,000 reports of issues from users. The platform aggregates status updates from a variety of sources, including user-generated reports.
Later in the day, Twitter’s support account updated users, stating that the problems had been resolved and that “things should be working as normal.”
According to Internet observatory NetBlocks, the disruption also affected image and video content, representing the sixth significant outage for Twitter in 2023, in contrast to three incidents during the same timeframe the previous year.
Skepticism regarding Twitter’s operational stability has been a concern since Musk took ownership in October, accompanied by extensive layoffs affecting thousands of employees.
NetBlocks Director Alp Toker emphasized that error messages linked to Twitter’s link-sharing service and internal API indicate issues with the platform’s microservices, which are impacting other service components. He suggested that Twitter’s updates may not be undergoing adequate testing prior to public deployment.
Sources familiar with the situation previously informed Reuters that many engineers tasked with addressing software bugs and service malfunctions were among those laid off or who departed Twitter.
Musk has also been focused on reducing expenses at the company and mandated employees in November to identify up to $1 billion in cuts related to infrastructure costs.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
