Twitter plagued by bugs and blackouts: what’s happening to social media in the Musk era

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Errors in uploading images, clicking on links and even strange behavior in trend topics. Up to complete service outages. Twitter had big technical problems on Monday and it is an event that is becoming more and more frequent, confirming that the mass layoffs wanted by the new owner, Elon Musk, are creating problems for the platform.
Musk himself said that Twitter’s latest outage on Monday “proved that some of the software underpinning the platform needs to be completely rewritten.”
In particular, the interruptions and problems encountered by some users on Monday were caused by an internal modification of the platform that created disruptions, the company said.
In fact, some have received a cryptic error message: “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint”. API refers to the application programming interface of the platform. Last month Twitter said it would start charging for access to its entry-level API, which allows developers to analyze some internal data, including tweets, to build tools for the public.
Another move desired by Musk to increase revenues and which has sparked controversy (such as the push towards Twitter Blue subscriptions). There would be precisely this novelty at the basis of the latest problems. “A small API change had huge repercussions,” Musk said in a tweet.
Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in October, said the likely time for a new person to be appointed to take over the day-to-day running of the social media platform could be towards the end of 2023. He spoke remotely at the World Government Summit of Dubai.
Musk has already laid off thousands of employees to cut costs and continues with this policy.
Twitter has fewer than 2,000 employees, up from 7,500 in October when Musk took over. The latest cuts have affected dozens of engineers responsible for keeping the site online.
Months ago he declared that Twitter was on the verge of bankruptcy and more recently, thanks to the cuts, he said it is close to breakeven. However, downsizing of the social media site has been blamed as the main cause of the disruption in recent months.
While the site continues to operate, some employees have sought to fill in the gaps left by laid-off colleagues, hence the increased risk of technical problems.
In February alone, Twitter experienced at least four major outages, up from nine in all of 2022, according to NetBlocks, an organization that tracks internet outages. This suggests that the frequency of outages is on the rise, according to NetBlocks. At the same time, the bugs that made Twitter less usable — preventing people from posting tweets, for example — are becoming more and more pronounced, according to researchers and users.
There are anomalies that prevent certain users, for a period, from tweeting or that cause likes and followers to drop suddenly. Other oddities include trending topics, which sometimes show old content and seem to change wildly for no reason.
“It used to be minor failures, but now Twitter is completely out of action in some regions of the world,” Saagar Jha, a Twitter engineer who left the company in May, told the New York Times. “When important things break, the people who knew the systems are gone to fix them,” he added.
The risk of problems has also been increased by changes made to internal systems, at the behest of Musk and to introduce new services and offerings. Blackouts to internal communication systems also have an impact. Last week, employees lost access to workplace chat platform Slack, leaving them without their primary mode of communication with coworkers or the ability to see a log of how workers previously resolved issues with Twitter .
From another point of view, it emerges that various technology companies are now looking with interest at Twitter, considering it a great experiment in technical sustainability; they want to understand how far staff can be reduced in such a company before the toy breaks.
In short, the future functioning of Twitter and its bugs can have an impact that goes far beyond the fate of this social network; but it concerns the entire technology industry and its workers.