Fasten your seat belts, we are crossing a zone of turbulence. The instability continues at Twitter, with another outage disrupting service for an hour on Monday, the third in less than a month.
While access to Twitter was not cut off this time around, web links, images, lists, or Tweetdeck.com all experienced issues, with an error message stating: “your subscription to API does not include access to this point”.
“Some features of Twitter may not work as expected. We made an internal change that had unintended consequences,” the network said at 6:19 p.m. PST, as many users reported issues. Everything returned to normal after 7:00 p.m.
“A small change to the API had massive ramifications. The code is very fragile for no good reason. It will have to be completely rewritten,” Elon Musk said.
End of free API access
The API is the programming interface that allows third parties (developers, researchers, etc.) to connect to Twitter data, for example to create bots (automated accounts) and services.
Last month, Twitter announced the end of free access to its API, ostensibly to combat spam and bad actors, with a basic subscription priced at $100. Faced with the anger of small developers, Elon Musk had partially backtracked, ensuring that basic non-paying access would be retained for bots “offering free quality content”.
Since buying Twitter, Elon Musk has taken very aggressive steps to cut costs. Nearly three out of four employees have been terminated or resigned. A data center near Sacramento was closed, and another in Atlanta reduced. And Twitter hasn’t paid some of its bills to Amazon Web Services, according to The Information.
According to Platformeron February 8, an employee had accidentally erased data on the maximum number of tweets allowed, causing a vast outage, which lasted several hours because the team handling these functions … no longer exists.