One engineer took down Twitter, caused Monday's outage because of Musk’s steep layoffs

Twitter suffered another major outage on Monday. This was the second time in a week that the social media platform suffered a major outage, with users from all across the world unable to either log in to their profiles or see their timelines behave in an erratic manner. Apparently, the latest Twitter outage was caused by one single engineer. Twitter’s API was compromised due to an accident, in which an engineer was trying to carry out Musk’s latest diktat of ending free access to the Twitter API. What happened on Monday? Twitter users logged in on Monday morning to discover a tangle of interconnected problems. Users would see a mysterious error notice stating that “your current API account does not include access to this endpoint” when they clicked on links. Images also ceased processing. Other users reported being unable to access TweetDeck, the Twitter-owned professional app that helps social media managers manage a brand’s presence on the platform. Also read: Twitter down for thousands of users across world, company cites ‘unintended consequences’ The timeline became chaotic as users complained about the disruption, often illustrating their points with pictures that couldn’t be seen because they wouldn’t load. In a tweet, Twitter provided a rather hazy explanation for what was going on. “Some sections of Twitter may not be functioning properly right now,” tweeted the company’s support account. “We implemented an internal shift that had unintended effects.” The news portal Platformer, has since then corroborated that the change in issue was part of an effort to end free access to the Twitter API. Twitter stated on February 1 that it will no longer allow free access to its API, essentially ending the existence of third-party clients and severely limiting the ability of outside researchers to study the network. The business has been working on a new paid API for coders to use. How one engineer took down Twitter accidentally However, only one site reliability expert was assigned to the project on developing and implementing the new API, indicating how deep Elon Musk’s cutbacks have gone. According to a current employee, the programmer made a “bad setup update” that “basically destroyed the Twitter API” on Monday. The shift had a domino effect within the business, taking down many of Twitter’s internal tools as well as the public-facing APIs. Engineers replied on Slack with variants of “crap” and “Twitter is down - the entire system” as they worked to resolve the issue. Also read: Twitter goes down, again, just days after Musk terminated 250 staff members Musk later wrote, “A minor API update had huge repercussions,” after Twitter investor Marc Andreessen shared an image showing the company’s API problems trending on the site. “For no apparent reason, the code structure is highly brittle. Will eventually require a full redesign.” Some present workers agree with this viewpoint, which blames at least some of Twitter’s issues on technical failures that precede Musk’s ownership of the business. For a reason, the fail whale became a symbol of the former Twitter. “There’s so much tech debt from Twitter 1.0 that making a change right now destroys everything,” says one present employee. Dealing with a brittle Twitter Nonetheless, when Musk took over the business, he vowed to drastically enhance the site’s speed and stability. His associates screened existing employees for technological aptitude, eventually laying off thousands of workers who were considered insufficiently “technical” to thrive under Musk’s guidance. Also read: Twitter in freefall: After firing 50 top executives on the weekend, Musk sacks 200 more workers However, nonstop layoffs have left the business with less than 550 full-time programmers. And, as former workers anticipated from the outset, the losses have increased Twitter’s vulnerability to catastrophic outages. The outage caused by the erroneous update on Monday was at least the sixth high-profile outage at Twitter since Musk took over. “This type of outage has become so frequent that I think we’re all numb to it,” a current employee says. And those are only the service outages. Other issues, such as the one that led Musk’s tweets to be made more visible on the timeline than any other user’s, have also roiled the user base. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .