While a BBC investigation raised the alarm on Monday about a lack of staff within Twitter, the fallout was illustrated by a collapse of the social network the same day. Once connected, users were facing various malfunctions: images had difficulty displaying while links simply didn’t work.
According to information from the American site Platformer, the breakdown was caused by a single employee. Faced with Elon Musk’s budget cut, the engineer found himself alone in a project. As a result of the mishandling, “unintended consequences” have occurred, according to the Twitter support account.
employees not surprised
The employee in question was responsible for removing free access to Twitter’s application programming interface (API). The announcement made on February 1 by Elon Musk aims to monetize a device that until then was available for free, which allows the creation of automatic accounts that publish information according to predefined events. Here, a bad input from a single employee undermined the entire system.
“technological debt”
However, this misadventure does not surprise an employee contacted by Platformer. “There is such technological debt from Twitter 1.0 that if we make a change now, everything breaks the number,” he assures the American site.
These are the same conclusions that emerge from the BBC investigation published this Monday. “A totally new, inexperienced person is doing what 20+ people used to do,” a computer engineer told British media, noting significant risks to the stability of the service.
Platformer recalls that the failure that occurred on March 6 is the sixth malfunction of Twitter since the beginning of the year. Which appears to resign the remaining employees. “These types of breakdowns have become so frequent that I think we are desensitized,” laments one employee. While another does not hesitate to drive home the point: “This is what happens when you fire 90% of the company.”
Source: BFM TV
