A Single Engineer 'Broke' Twitter Last Night: Here's What Happened
Twitter was down last night... again! Users were unable to open links, view images, and videos in a string of back-end issues that have plagued Twitter after Elon Musk took over and slimmed entire teams through mass firings.
When Twitter users clicked on links last night, they saw an error message saying that their "current API plan does not include access to this endpoint." While most users struggled with Twitter and its sister service TweetDeck, it was unclear why Twitter has been experiencing a flurry of issues that cause disruptions in service.
Not much later, Twitter chimed in, saying the following - "Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now... We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences."
How one engineer "broke" Twitter
What could have caused this, are you wondering? Remember when Twitter said that it was shutting down free access to the Twitter application programming interface (API), making it a premium feature. API essentially allows computer programmes to interact with each other, and is also responsible for automated bots (the funny ones) on Twitter. This change also meant no third-party clients for Twitter.
According to Platformer, it's this change that disrupted Twitter services last night. The company has been working on a paid API for developers, but with only one site reliability engineer on site, all thanks to Elon Musk's drastic cuts.
Also read:?Writer Claims To Have Manipulated Twitter's New 'For You' Feed To Go Viral Again
It appears that the engineer made a "bad configuration change" on Monday that ended up "[breaking] the Twitter API," an employee told Platformer. The problem with such things is that even a "small API change [can have] massive ramifications," as Musk tweeted later.
"The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite," Musk added. This might be partly true, as an employee said that everything has the potential to "break" in case changes are made to technical aspects of Twitter.
Also read:?Twitter To Make 2-Factor Authentication A Paid Feature. Here Are Better Alternatives
When Musk fired entire teams and departments, many employees warned that such outages would become frequent, and they have. This year, Twitter has experienced six outages including the one last night.
What do you think about Twitter's troubles in recent times? Let us know in the comments below.?For more in the world of?technology?and?science, keep reading?Indiatimes.com.
