Another crash for ‘brittle’ Twitter

SAN FRANICSCO — Elon Musk’s Twitter is a house of cards.

On two occasions recently, almost exactly a month apart, minor changes to Twitter’s code appeared to break the website.

The latest outage came Monday as thousands of users found they could not access links, photos or other key aspects of the site.

“A small API change had massive ramifications,” Twitter CEO Elon Musk wrote in a tweet Monday, referring to the tool used by third-party developers who run programs that draw on Twitter data and post to its site. “The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”

Since taking over Twitter, CEO Elon Musk has laid off more than two-thirds of the company’s staff, embarking on aggressive cost-cutting and shedding workers in part by compelling them to a commit to an “extremely hardcore” workplace or leave the company.

The massive layoffs led to widespread concerns about Twitter’s ability to retain core functions, as critical engineering teams were reduced to one or zero staffers.

In the months since then, Twitter has faced multiple outages, hampering key features: loading tweets and notifications, sending tweets and direct messages, accessing links and photographs.

Current and former staffers said each came as the company made changes to its code.

“Every mistake in code and operations is now deadly,” a former engineer who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution told The Washington Post in November, explaining that those left over were “going to be overwhelmed, overworked and, because of that, more likely to make mistakes.”