Recent Twitter Outage Caused By Single Engineer Handling API: Report

Twitter's outage mostly affected users in the US but was fixed within a couple of hours.

Musk also Tweeted, “A small API change had massive ramifications."

Twitter suffered an outage on Monday, with users seeing a message that said, “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.” Users complained of images not loading properly and losing access to TweetDeck as well. According to a report by Platformer, the reason behind the outage, which mostly affected users in the US, was an engineer’s mistake, who is said to be single-handedly responsible for managing Twitter’s API. 

Twitter’s official support account responded to the outage, “Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences.”

Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences. We’re working on this now and will share an update when it’s fixed.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) March 6, 2023

Platformer report said that the change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API. 

Last month, Twitter announced that it will not be supporting free access to its API and the same will be available as a paid service instead. The company’s official developer account tweeted, “Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead.”

Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead 🧵

— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) February 2, 2023

According to the report, a company employee said that on Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API.” It added that only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project. 

The latest Twitter outage comes after the Elon Musk-owned company laid off 200 more employees. After his hostile $44-billion takeover of Twitter, Musk has been on a cost-cutting spree, resulting in loss of jobs for thousands of Twitter workers across the world. Before the takeover, back in October 2022, Twitter had around 7,500 employees globally. Now, Twitter reportedly has around 1,800 employees left. 

The API change didn’t only cause an outage on the platform, but also had other consequences for the company and brought down Twitter’s internal tools as well. The other engineers of the company strived hard to fix the issue as Elon Musk was left ‘furious’, the report further said. 

Musk also Tweeted, “A small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”

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

While the company managed to recover from its latest outage within a couple hours, a current employee told Platformer, “There’s so much tech debt from Twitter 1.0 that if you make a change right now, everything breaks,” 

After Musk’s cost-cutting spree, the company is still left with under 550 full-time engineers and the losses have made Twitter increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic outages, the report added. 

“This type of outage has become so frequent that I think we’re all numb to it,” a company employee reportedly said.