Twitter glitch briefly disrupts service; owner Elon Musk calls platform ‘brittle’

Twitter says issues affecting the platform Monday have been resolved after an internal change led to “unintended consequences.”

Outage tracker Downdetector reported that issues started cropping up at Twitter shortly before noon ET on Monday. Users reported issues with logging in and getting videos and images to load.

The company, which has experienced an uptick instability and bugs in recent months after Elon Musk cut its staff sharply, said Monday “some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences.”

Musk acknowledged the issues on Monday, calling the platform “brittle” in a tweet and saying the problems would be “fixed shortly.”

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He said in a follow-up tweet that a small change to Twitter’s base code had “massive ramifications” and suggested the programming would eventually need a “complete rewrite.”

Around 1 p.m. ET, Twitter said in an update that the platform “should be working as normal.”

Internet observatory NetBlocks said Monday’s issue was affecting image and video content too, in what was its sixth major outage this year, compared with three in the same period last year.

“Error messages supplied by Twitter’s link sharing platform and internal API point to problems with the platform’s microservices, which are having a knock-on effect on other aspects of the service,” NetBlocks Director Alp Toker told Reuters.

“This suggests Twitter has not been effectively testing its updates before pushing them to the public.”

Twitter engineers and experts have been warning that the platform is at an increased risk of fraying since Musk fired most of the people who worked on keeping it running. Just last month, a bug left users unable to send tweets.

Already in November, engineers who left Twitter described for The Associated Press why they expect considerable unpleasantness for Twitter’s more than 230 million users now that well over two-thirds of the San Francisco-based company’s pre-Musk core services engineers are apparently gone.

While they don’t anticipate near-term collapse, the engineers said Twitter could get very rough at the edges — especially if Musk makes major changes without much off-platform testing.

— with files from The Associated Press, Reuters