On Monday, Twitter suffered a multitude of glitches that lasted for more than an hour, causing issues such as broken links, login problems, and images failing to load. Following a significant reduction in staff after Elon Musk’s involvement, the company has experienced a surge in instability and technical issues in recent months. In response to the latest outage, Twitter explained that “Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now” due to an internal change that had unintended effects. Users attempting to access the platform’s help page were presented with an error message stating that their API plan did not provide access to the endpoint, with a link to a developer page that was also dysfunctional.
On Monday, Elon Musk posted a tweet stating, “This platform is so fragile (sigh). Will be fixed shortly.” Shortly afterward, Twitter itself tweeted that it had resolved the problem, at around 10 a.m. Pacific time.
At around midday U.S. Eastern time, numerous users started experiencing outages and reported them to Downdetector. NetBlocks, an internet access monitoring organization, stated that Twitter was encountering global slowdowns and outages that were affecting a large number of users. They also noted that this was impacting the display of image and video content. Certain users were unable to view the images that others were posting.
Following Elon Musk’s decision to dismiss most of the employees who were responsible for maintaining Twitter, engineers and experts have cautioned that the platform is at greater risk of deteriorating. Last month, a glitch caused users to be unable to send tweets. According to former Twitter engineers who spoke to The Associated Press in November, the company’s more than 230 million users are likely to face a turbulent path forward, given that well over two-thirds of the San Francisco-based firm’s core services engineers from before Musk’s tenure have left.
The engineers noted that although they do not foresee an imminent collapse, Twitter has the potential to become quite rough around the edges, particularly if Elon Musk implements significant changes without adequate off-platform testing.
