Twitter suffers 45-minute outage due to technology breakdown
Twitter experienced a major outage on Monday morning that lasted for around 45 minutes. The social media giant’s infrastructure broke links to third party websites, causing a massive spike in the number of complaints from users. Downdetector, a website that tracks outages, reported a surge in complaints from 31 to over 10,000 in just over 30 minutes. 76% of the complaints were about the Twitter website, while 14% were related to the Twitter app.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk took to the platform to blame the company’s infrastructure for the issue, tweeting, “This platform is so brittle (sigh). Will be fixed shortly.” Musk went on to add that a “small API change had massive ramifications” and that the code stack is “extremely brittle for no good reason” and will need a complete rewrite.
Twitter users responded with some hilarious tweets, blaming Musk for mismanaging the platform. However, the social media company confirmed that it was an internal change that had some unintended consequences, and they were working to resolve the issue.
In the U.S., outages were reported in several cities including Boston, New York, Washington, and Tampa. Other cities affected included St. Louis, Atlanta, Chicago, Toronto, Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Seattle.
The number of Downdetector users reporting an issue with Twitter has declined sharply, with only 250 users reporting issues at 1:27 pm EST. The Twitter Support account confirmed that “things should now be working as normal. Thanks for sticking with us!” However, the company did not provide any information on what caused the links to fail and images not to appear in the first place.
Some users have speculated that Twitter’s decision to charge third-party sites for API access to Twitter could have contributed to the outage. However, this has not been confirmed by the social media company.
It’s worth noting that after buying Twitter last October, Musk immediately fired half of Twitter’s staff before realizing that he needed some of those who received pink slips. The move was seen as controversial by many in the tech industry.
The Twitter outage comes at a time when social media companies are under increasing pressure to improve the quality of their platforms. Twitter has faced criticism in recent years for failing to tackle hate speech and misinformation on its platform. The company has taken steps to address these issues, but many critics argue that more needs to be done.
In conclusion, Twitter’s 45-minute breakdown was caused by a breakdown in the social media site’s technology that broke links to third party websites. While the issue has now been resolved, the incident highlights the importance of maintaining robust and reliable technology infrastructure in the digital age.
