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How a single engineer brought down Twitter on Monday (Platformer)
https://www.platformer.news/p/how-a-single-engineer-brought-downThe change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API, Platformer can now confirm. On February 1, the company announced it will no longer support free access to its API, which effectively ended the existence of third-party clients and dramatically limited outside researchers’ ability to study the network. The company has been building a new, paid API for developers to work with.
But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told. On Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,” according to a current employee.
The change had cascading consequences inside the company, bringing down much of Twitter’s internal tools along with the public-facing APIs. On Slack, engineers responded with variations of “crap” and “Twitter is down – the entire thing” as they scrambled to fix the problem.
-snip-
Monday’s errant configuration change was at least the sixth high-profile service outage at Twitter this year:
On January 23, Android users temporarily couldn’t load new tweets or post them.
On February 8, an error message told users that they were “over the daily limit for sending Tweets,” preventing them from posting.
On February 15, tweets stopped loading.
On February 18, the timeline broke and replies disappeared.
On March 1, the timeline stopped working.
-snip-
But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told. On Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,” according to a current employee.
The change had cascading consequences inside the company, bringing down much of Twitter’s internal tools along with the public-facing APIs. On Slack, engineers responded with variations of “crap” and “Twitter is down – the entire thing” as they scrambled to fix the problem.
-snip-
Monday’s errant configuration change was at least the sixth high-profile service outage at Twitter this year:
On January 23, Android users temporarily couldn’t load new tweets or post them.
On February 8, an error message told users that they were “over the daily limit for sending Tweets,” preventing them from posting.
On February 15, tweets stopped loading.
On February 18, the timeline broke and replies disappeared.
On March 1, the timeline stopped working.
-snip-
The article quotes an anonymous current Twitter employee who said, "This is what happens when you fire 90 percent of the company."
Musk called the platform's code "extremely brittle," taking no blame for the failure.
And told his readers, "New Twitter is the source of truth" (which got "New Twitter" trending, with a lot of ridicule):
Link to tweet
And he warned of the perils of Twitter addiction from personal experience:
Link to tweet
Link to tweet
Twitter's main problem obviously isn't "brittle" code.
1 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
