Rise in Twitter outages since Musk takeover hints at more systemic problems

On Monday Twitter broke for the sixth time this year. Clicking any link on the social network resulted in an error message, while attempting to post a new image resulted in nothing but a big blank box where the picture should have been.

The error message referred to the Twitter API, a service that allows other programmes to interact with the site. In January, the company had, with no notice, banned third-party apps from using the API, rendering them non-functional overnight. The error message suggested that Twitter had continued tinkering with the feature and accidentally banned its own apps in the process.

Just a single reliability engineer had been allocated to a project to create a paid version of the API, according to a report in the Platformer newsletter, and that engineer pushed a mistaken change to the live version of the site without realising the ramifications.

Cost-cutting measures under which Twitter has stopped paying bills for office space, janitorial supplies and even web hosting are starting to meet pushback. The company stepped back from a bruising confrontation with Amazon Web Services as it tried to negotiate a discount on its cloud computing, according to the news site The Information, while a similar standoff with Salesforce saw its Slack communications platform disabled entirely over one weekend in February, leaving staffers unable to collaborate.

Musk also reiterated his plans to introduce payments on Twitter, and said he envisions users could eventually send money to each other with one click.