Twitter suffered a major outage on Monday, leaving a large number of users unable to view photos and access links from the social media platform.
This was the third service disruption in less than a month to impact Twitter, raising questions on its new owner Elon Musk’s management of the company.
The outage was due to an “internal change”, which fetched error messages when users tried to open pictures or links within tweets.
“Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now,” tweeted Twitter Support. “We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences. We’re working on this now and will share an update when it’s fixed.”
Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences. We’re working on this now and will share an update when it’s fixed.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) March 6, 2023
According to Musk, the error was caused by a small change with Twitter’s data-access tool. “The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”
Within an hour, however, an update from Twitter Support suggested that the glitch had been resolved. “Things should now be working as normal.”
Things should now be working as normal. Thanks for sticking with us! https://t.co/JXTllrv0k0
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) March 6, 2023
The previous two outages this month involved users encountering a blank screen on their timeline and facing difficulties in tweeting, sending direct messages and following new accounts.
Twitter has been hit by a number of service disruptions globally since Musk’s high-profile $44 billion takeover. A number of tech experts and online safety advocates have imputed these outages to massive staff reductions made by Musk as part of his cost-cutting measures.
So far, Musk has reportedly brought down the total number of employees to roughly 2,000 from 7,500 in just months. The layoffs also affected engineers who were responsible for preventing service disruptions at the troubled firm.
