Thousands of Twitter users reported problems accessing links from the social media platform and other websites on Monday, before the Elon Musk-owned company said it had fixed the latest in a series of outages.
Musk tweeted that a small change with Twitter’s data-access tool had caused the problem. “The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite,” he said.
Downdetector, which tracks outages, reported more than 8,000 incidents of people reporting issues. The website collates status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.
By early afternoon eastern time, the company said things should be back to normal.
Things should now be working as normal. Thanks for sticking with us! <a href=”https://t.co/JXTllrv0k0″>https://t.co/JXTllrv0k0</a>
—@TwitterSupport
Internet observatory NetBlocks said the issue had affected image and video content, too, in what was its sixth major outage this year, compared with three in the same period last year.
“Error messages supplied by Twitter’s link sharing platform and internal API point to problems with the platform’s microservices, which are having a knock-on effect on other aspects of the service,” NetBlocks Director Alp Toker told Reuters.
“This suggests Twitter has not been effectively testing its updates before pushing them to the public.”
The layoffs and departures from Twitter have included many engineers responsible for responding to software bugs and other service issues, sources previously told Reuters.
Musk has also raced to cut costs at the company and in November ordered employees to find up to $1 billion US in infrastructure cost cuts.
