Twitter’s seemingly never-ending woes in the post-layoff world

Social media platform Twitter saw a major outage on Monday which was described as an unexpected consequence of a small update made to the platform’s API. The outage is one of the many that the platform has seen in recent times after laying off many of its employees.

Twitter users saw yet another significant outage on Twitter on Monday. The social networking site experienced a significant outage for the second time in a week, preventing users worldwide from accessing their profiles or causing their timelines to behave strangely.

On Monday morning, when users signed in to Twitter, they found a maze of related issues. Users would encounter a cryptic error notice indicating that “your current API account does not include access to this endpoint” when they clicked on links.

The processing of images also stopped. Some users complained that they were unable to utilize TweetDeck, a professional tool owned by Twitter that aids in managing a brand’s social media presence.

The company’s tech support account tweeted, “certain sections of Twitter may not be operating as expected right now.” The account added that the outage was an unintended side effect of a platform update.

The social media company founded by Elon Musk was working hard to stabilize after numerous waves of layoffs saw more than two-thirds of staff let go when the failure occurred, which looked to be rectified in less than an hour. 

Application Programming Interface, or API, is the term used to describe the Twitter software that is made available to outside developers so they can create their own platform modifications. Twitter announced last month that it would stop providing free access to third-party developers as it looks for new revenue streams.

Many advertisers have fled Twitter since Musk gained control of the company, causing instability and jeopardizing the site’s primary funding stream.

Musk talked about Monday’s outage on the platform, saying that a slight change in the API had massive consequences; he also noted that the code stack would ultimately need to be rewritten as it is incredibly brittle in its current state. 

The messaging network’s most recent issues emerged a week after news of another wave of layoffs, which affected engineers working on machine learning and platform dependability and product managers, prominent data specialists, and engineers. According to experts, Twitter has a skeleton staff, making it subject to outages, false information, and hazardous content because there aren’t enough people working there to keep the site operational.

It also comes after several technical mishaps, including one in which tweets from Elon Musk suddenly took over millions of users’ feeds, including those who weren’t following the businessman.

Insider Intelligence predicts that from 368 million users worldwide in 2018, Twitter’s total monthly users will decrease by about 32 million users between 2022 and 2024.

The social network’s revenue and adjusted profit decreased by around 40% year over year in December as a result of sponsors leaving, according to sources close to the business, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.

Musk has made an effort to transition Twitter away from advertising and promote subscriptions as a new revenue stream, but the results have been mixed thus far.

The company now has fewer than 550 full-time programmers after nonstop layoffs. Yet the losses have made Twitter more susceptible to disastrous disruptions, as former employees foresaw from the start. At least six high-profile outages have occurred at Twitter since Musk took charge, with the most recent one occurring on Monday due to an incorrect update.