Twitter The social network fell victim to one of the biggest declines in its history this Wednesday, after months of spending cuts and atrocious changes by its owner and CEO. Elon Musk,
Tweeting, retweeting, quoting tweets, sending direct messages or following new users, basic actions within the platform, were impossible to perform for many users for many hours, The Twitter web and app were still working, so users could scroll through previously posted content, but they could not communicate with that material.
A former Twitter employee described what was happening “a massive blackout“, in a private conversation to which he has access business Insider, In another message, a worker at a major technology company complained that his company’s corporate accounts were also not working, adding that it was “a big problem” for Twitter.
Users began to realize that they could not tweet or retweet, among other things, because of the message that appeared when attempting to do so. ,You have exceeded the daily limit for sending tweetsNotice noted. People were also unable to access his direct messages, whose tab displayed a notice saying “something went wrong”.
As Musk is driving change to Twitter, he is monetizing various features of the platform that were free for a long time. The error messages that appeared on Wednesday could be evidence, or a precursor of sorts, that Tweets and Direct Messages could be the next paid features.
A person familiar with the company’s plans said it was reported within Twitter. A “race” to find the source of the problem and fix it. Tweets and “likes” were working again for many users in Spain early Thursday, while sending and retweeting direct messages was still not possible.
The social network published a tweet from his account Help In which he acknowledged: “Twitter may not be working for some of you. We apologize for the inconvenience. We know and are working to fix it.”
The Twitter crash prompted Tesla’s CEO to send an email to his employees instructing them to “stop the development of new ” To guarantee the “stability of the system”, explained the person receiving this message. According to Luck, Musk’s message was sent to employees in the early hours of Wednesday (mid-afternoon in Spain).
A spokeswoman for the company did not respond to a request for comment. business Insider,
These types of outages and failure of some functions have become more frequent at Twitter, as Musk has instituted mass layoffs and extreme spending cuts. The social network has fewer employees today than it did 10 years ago, according to data from Apptopia, while the platform’s users have grown from barely 200 million per month to nearly 250 million daily.
A former Twitter director had already assured business Insider What It was to be expected that Twitter would slowly degrade instead of bursting out suddenly.
“The most likely scenario was that there would be a major fault, it would be discovered late, and it would not be clear what caused the problem or how to fix it, because you would have none of the people to fix it in the first place.” is in place. moment,” said the former executive.
The speed with which Musk wants the changes to take effect is one cause of the problem. Testing to add new features is done so quickly, at such scale, and with so little effort that Problems are not detected in time,
According to 2 people associated with the company, some planned changes may be the reason for Twitter’s fall. It was chosen Wednesday by the social network’s CEO to end free access for developers to an API that has allowed the creation of accounts and automated services. Celebrated by millions of users,
an account that shows the progress of the year visually a loading barTill then tweetdeck, an organization tool developed from the Twitter API that the company eventually acquired. TweetDeck stopped working on Wednesday, as did a number of automated accounts that have been pulled out of payments Musk requires API access.
This Wednesday was also the day chosen by Twitter to offer users the possibility to tweet up to 4,000 characters in a single message. subscribed to twitter blue,
