Twitter had shed greater than two-thirds of its workers since Elon Musk took over the corporate final yr, and the steep cuts have led many to surprise how lengthy the location might proceed functioning usually — and what may occur if technical issues arose.
On Wednesday, that concern turned the truth as Twitter mentioned it was working internally to get the issues fastened. “Sorry for the trouble. We’re aware and working to get this fixed,” it tweeted.
Attempts to ship tweets have been met with messages studying: “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.” Beyond posting tweets, customers reported an lack of ability to ship direct messages, observe different accounts, and cargo content material on their timelines.
testing 1 2 3 🎙️ is that this factor on?
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) February 8, 2023
The web site Down Detector, which tracks outages based mostly on person studies, mentioned: “User reports indicate problems at Twitter.”
While some tweets continued to load, many have been from customers who found a workaround to ship their posts: scheduling tweets upfront.
Some of the features gave the impression to be coming again late Wednesday afternoon, because the outage had stretched over an hour. But the issues endured for a lot of — as customers refreshed the location to seek out their notifications weren’t loading and older tweets have been populating their timelines. By late night, lots of the features appeared to have been restored.
On Down Detector, the variety of studies — which had peaked within the afternoon — was down however nonetheless properly above regular ranges.
Musk’s layoffs, and the fallout from an inside ultimatum urging workers to decide to an “extremely hardcore” Twitter or go away their jobs, led to feverish hypothesis in regards to the downfall of Twitter. As tons of departed the corporate after refusing to decide to Musk’s pledge, many departments — together with people who deal with core features — have been short-staffed, down to 2, one or zero remaining staff.
Musk bought the location for $44 billion in October, pledging to revive “free speech” and deal with points reminiscent of spam and bots, as he heaped criticism on the prior administration’s method to content material moderation.
Twitter might not be working as anticipated for a few of you. Sorry for the difficulty. We’re conscious and dealing to get this fastened.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) February 8, 2023
A congressional oversight committee held hearings on Wednesday regarding allegations that Twitter’s earlier workers made selections favorable to Democrats within the 2020 elections. At the listening to, energy briefly went out on Capitol Hill.
Even earlier than Musk’s takeover, workers had raised considerations about Twitter’s resilience within the occasion of outages. Twitter’s off-site information facilities have been highlighted as a significant vulnerability.
In a criticism obtained by congressional committees, whistleblower Peiter Zatko, for instance, raised the prospect of overlapping outages at Twitter’s information facilities that would go away it unable to accurately restart its servers. Such an outage, he mentioned, might result in a lack of essential information and go away the service down for months.