Today, the social media giant Twitter faced an unexpected outage when its API suddenly broke down, a move described by significant user and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, as evidence of the site’s “brittle” technical platform.
The error first surfaced earlier this morning when Twitter users started to experience issues, such as failed attempts to login, errors in loading posts, slowness in the application, and some were even unable to perform basic tasks such as liking or retweeting posts.
The sudden disruption sparked global panic amongst users, some of whom are reliant on the platform and its services for a living. People experienced a significant loss in business, with some complaining that their account scans were incorrectly attributed to them due to the error.
This was not the first outage for Twitter, but it was certainly one of its biggest to date. Although the company managed to restore its services in an hour, some features such as replying and deleting tweets remain affected even after the restoration.
And without fail, Elon Musk had to offer his own candid judgement on the situation. In a tweet, the CEO slammed the social media platform for having a “brittle” technical platform and questioned its ability to handle emergency scenarios. He implied that Twitter could have gone down for longer durations, leaving users without a primary source of news, primarily during these moments when the world is in a state of disarray.
This is not the first time that Elon Musk has publicly criticised Twitter, previously expressing his dissatisfaction with its moderation policies, particularly related to his online behavior.
The Twitter bug was quickly fixed, however it has highlighted the need for an improved technical platform if Twitter is to remain one of the world’s online leaders. It is unclear if Twitter is preparing such a platform, but we can be certain that Musk won’t stand idle while they take their engineer’s time to do so.