Twitter API: Since Elon Musk took over Twitter and fired over half the employees of Twitter and the platform has been experiencing outages, they have become quite common. This is so much, that even users of Twitter’s microblogging website are now immune to the issues, a report by Platformer exposes. Twitter was unavailable for a lot of customers on Monday. While some users were able to find links that weren’t working some were unable to view tweets from other users.
The recent outage on Twitter API
Twitter users also reported seeing a cryptic message that read, “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information.”
Twitter’s official support account reacted to the issue and a tweet from the handle read “Some areas of Twitter might not be functioning in the way we expect them to currently. We’ve implemented an internal change that caused unintended effects. We’re currently working on this and will provide an update once we have it fixed.”
Platformer has published a report that Platformer has disclosed the cause of the downtime, which caused the most inconvenience to people in the US the most. It was due to an error by the engineer who is the sole person accountable for the management of the technology giant’s API, Platformer reports.
What caused Twitter shut down this evening?
The report further confirms the internal change Twitter Support referred to in its tweet was linked to Twitter’s plan to shut down its API for free access.
In the last month, Twitter announced that it would no longer provide access to its API for free and will instead make it offered as a paid-for service instead. The tweet from the company’s official developer account reads “Starting February 9th We will no longer offer accessibility for free to Twitter API including v2 and v1.1. A basic paid option will be made available.”
In reality, given how significant Elon Musk’s cutbacks to the company, only an engineer was enlisted in charge of the task, as the report from Platformer says. On Monday morning, that engineer implemented an error in a configuration that led to the Twitter API breaking according to a Twitter employee who spoke to Platformer. This is why users saw the message in their feeds.
The change to the API didn’t just result in an outage for the platform, but it also caused other issues for the company and brought the tools used internally by Twitter down also. Other engineers from Twitter worked hard to solve the problem, and Elon Musk was left ‘furious as the report states.
Elon Musk’s tweet
Musk was also tweeting about the outage, and wrote in response to a user that “A tiny API modification had huge implications. Code stacks are extremely fragile without a reason. It will eventually require a complete revision.”
The issue was fixed by the team, and Twitter Support had confirmed the same on the night before. “Things are now running as normal. Thank you for staying with us,” a tweet on its handle read.
