EITHEROn Monday Twitter broke for the sixth time this year. Clicking on any link on the social network resulted in an error message, while trying to post a new image resulted in nothing more than a big blank box where the image should have been.
Unlike the past four outages, three in February and one as early as March, the site was not completely down, giving Twitter users the opportunity to engage in their favorite activity: discussing the ongoing destruction of Twitter live on the place. (The sixth outage this year, in January, only affected Android users.) Trending topics on the site quickly filled with various outage-related phrases, as users speculated that Elon Musk’s own lawsuits had ultimately caused the glitch.
The error message was in reference to the Twitter API, a service that allows other programs to interact with the site. In January, the company banned, without warning, third-party apps from using the API, rendering them out of business overnight. The error message suggested that Twitter had continued to tinker with the feature and accidentally banned its own apps in the process.
“A small API change had massive ramifications”, Musk confirmed later that day, calling the site’s code “extremely brittle for no good reason.” Solving the problems, he added, would “ultimately need a complete rewrite.”
A reliability engineer had only been assigned to a project to create a paid version of the API, according to a report in the Platformer newsletterand that engineer pushed a mistaken switch to the live version of the site without realizing the ramifications.
Mistakes happen, and Twitter isn’t the only one to have been taken offline by a single engineer: In 2021, Facebook’s services were offline for nearly six hours after the company was accidentally deleted from the Internet’s “phone book.” But the regularity of outages on Twitter, which seems to get worse over time, has some wondering if the occasional glitches add up to a more systemic problem.
Steven Murdoch, a professor of security engineering at University College London, said substantial reductions in Twitter’s engineering team meant fewer people to monitor systems and catch minor problems before they become larger ones.
“The result is that eventually problems occur that are serious enough to be noticed by a large part of Twitter’s user base,” he said. “It has been suggested that rewriting Twitter’s code could help prevent these types of issues, but this is a high-risk strategy. It would result in dividing the already reduced engineering team between keeping the old code and making the new version.”
Pushing for such a rewrite has already been the cause of Musk’s downfall once before. In the early 2000s, after his company, X.com, merged with the creators of PayPal, Musk, as CEO, led a project to merge the back-ends of the two companies, which had been built on incompatible systems. The rewrite became “a holy war,” according to a 2007 profile of his time at PayPal, and just six months after the merger, Musk was fired as CEO during his honeymoon.
At Twitter, a rewrite will also have to compete with other demands on the company’s time. On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that the EU had required Musk to hire more moderation experts to comply with the bloc’s new regime to regulate social media platforms, while the US Federal Trade Commission is investigating the company amid concerns that Twitter’s ability to protect users could have been affected by the layoffs. Since Musk completed the $44bn (£37bn) takeover of Twitter in October last year, the workforce has shrunk from 7,500 employees to around 2,000.
On Tuesday, Musk apologized to a Twitter worker after arguing with him about whether or not he still worked at the company. The exchange included Musk referring to Haraldur Thorleifsson’s disability as an “excuse” for his performance at work. Musk, who later apologized to Thorleifsson for a “misunderstanding” he led to his tweets, said Thorleifsson was now considering staying with the company.
Cost-cutting measures under which Twitter has stopped paying bills for office space, cleaning supplies and even web hosting are starting to meet with pushback. The company took a step back from a forceful showdown with Amazon Web Services while trying to negotiate a discount on its cloud computing, according to news site The Information, while a similar standoff with Salesforce saw its Slack communications platform go completely offline over a weekend in February, leaving employees unable to collaborate.
Twitter’s engineering problems come against a backdrop of financial pressure against the company, which took on $13 billion in debt as part of Musk’s financing package for the acquisition. That debt requires quarterly interest payments of about $300 million.
Musk made the first payment in January, but analysts warned that the business, which posted losses for most of its existence before the acquisition, must turn around to consistently make those payments. The Tesla boss said this week that Twitter had an “opportunity” to be cash flow positive in the next financial quarter, referring to one of the financial metrics that can be used to indicate whether a company can meet its payments. debt. But at what price? Twitter has a “chance” to be financially sustainable due to cutbacks that appear to be affecting the site’s reliability, as well as alarming regulators.
According to Twitter’s last set of quarterly results as a publicly traded company, released in 2022, Twitter generated negative free cash flow (spending more cash to run the business than it takes in) of nearly $124 million.
Musk also reiterated his plans to introduce payments on Twitter, saying he envisions users eventually being able to send money to each other with a single click.
“I think it is possible to become the largest financial institution in the world,” he said.
Still, advertising is Twitter’s biggest source of revenue, accounting for the lion’s share of its $5.1 billion 2021 billing, and Musk admitted shortly after the $44 billion acquisition in October last year that there had been a “massive” drop in advertising revenue. In January it was reported that Twitter’s daily revenue was down 40% compared to the previous year.
Farhad Divecha, managing director of UK digital marketing agency Accuracast, said: “Trust is an important factor at the moment, and these disruptions don’t instill much confidence in Twitter’s ability to serve our customers at the level at which that we or the brands they represent feel comfortable putting money into the service.”
The site breaks add another complication to Musk’s drive to put Twitter on a sustainable footing.