After Musk’s mass layoffs, one engineer’s mistake “broke the Twitter API”
When Elon Musk blamed Twitter's outage yesterday on code that "is extremely brittle for no good reason," he ignored the effect his massive layoffs had on Twitter's ability to keep the site running.
Twitter said the outage, which broke links and other functionality for about an hour, was caused by "an internal change that had some unintended consequences." That change, according to a Platformer article, "was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API."
During the outage, clicking on links brought up the following error message: "Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint." The error message led to widespread speculation that the problem was related to Musk's decision to charge for API access, and Platformer's reporting appears to confirm that. But the deeper problem is Musk's cost-cutting that has reduced Twitter's staff from about 7,500 to under 2,000. Twitter has fewer than 550 full-time engineers, according to Platformer's report.
