An engineer and a configuration change caused Twitter to crash

Twitter has survived another downfall of the Musk era, though this timeit would be an engineer’s mistake. Report Platformer indicates that the bug affecting web and non-web apps was related to plans to limit free API access. Reliability engineer responsible for the project made an incorrect configuration change that broke the Twitter API.

Information leaked to the media by employees of the social network hinted that the error affected not only users, but also several teams within the company. Several employees have reported to Slack that all of Twitter is down because the settings have been uploaded to some of the internal tools. He The incident angered Elon Muskwho will later show his face to justify what happened.

“A small API change had a huge impact. The code stack is extremely fragile for no good reason. Ultimately, a complete overhaul will be required.” the mogul said on Twitter.. This view is shared by most of the engineers still employed by the company. Waterfalls have become daily bread And this is not Elon Musk’s fault, but a ten-year-old code.

“This type of failure has become so common that I think we are all numb,” said one employee. “Twitter 1.0 has so much technical debt that if you make changes right now, everything will break,” another worker said. The current situation is critical and proof of this is that today’s fall This is the sixth major ruling this year..

Elon Musk Can’t Transform Twitter

When Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter for $43 billion, he backed his intention to make it a free speech platform. months He devoted himself to pointing out all the problems that reigned in the social network. – both on a technical and managerial level – promising changes once he takes command. The expected day arrived, and instead of implementing a strategy to transform the company, more than half of the employees were laid off.

Today’s incident, as well as timeline failures and mentions that happened in February, or problems in the Android application are the result of the company that works with the fewest resources. According to Twitter staff, only one reliability engineer is responsible for the API project. This is important because an unexpected adjustment breaks the platform and can take hours to fix.

The lack of staff also affects relationships with developers or Twitter users themselves. Although the company confirmed the decisionthe service status site reported no incidents. The lack of a PR department is obvious since the only way to find out about it is through Elon’s tweets.

The API change that broke Twitter is part of a drive to restrict free access. Elon and company are planning a payment API and limited access for Twitter Blue members. The problem is that no one wants to pay eight dollars (or more) a month for an unreliable product that has problems every week.