Twitter has not raised its head since the arrival of Elon Musk, who bought the social network because it was important for the “future of civilization” to preserve “a common digital agora.” The problem is that the platform is far from that idyllic purpose that the South African tycoon imagined: it adds two widespread falls in less than a week, child abuse content grows, there are hardly any teams left defending state disinformation campaigns and content moderation continues being a complete unknown.
Added to all these problems are the numerous changes implemented by Elon Musk. First, he modified the verification system. Then came the pay-for-upgrade subscription. Various tweaks to the algorithm and the ‘For You’ tab. Now, he prepares to launch his new payment application programming interface (API). And everything has been done with a low staff, which explains why Twitter is not able to survive a week without experiencing problems or service outages. A project taken with pins, point out some workers.
The last setback came this Monday. Twitter experienced worldwide failures when it came to uploading photos, clicking on links posted on the web, or viewing the desktop version correctly. In some cases, messages posted by other users years ago have jumped to the feed of some accounts as if they were new.
The company took almost an hour to fix it and didn’t give too much explanation about it. “Things should be running as normal. Thanks for staying with us!” the social network wrote 50 minutes after it admitted in another tweet that they made “an internal change that had some unintended consequences.”
The Twitter boss noted shortly after that “a small API change had massive ramifications.” “The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Ultimately, it will need a complete rewrite,” he clinched.
The problem was in the API, but due to a lack of personnel, according to The Verge. The change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API, but only one engineer took on the job at the time and made an “incorrect configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,” he noted. a current employee to this medium.
On Slack, engineers responded with variations of “shit” and “Twitter is down, everything” as they scrambled to fix the issue. Others assure that these falls are consequences of a lack of personnel, given the drastic cuts made by Musk since his arrival.
And, in his eagerness to cut expenses, the tweeter boss continues with pruning. According to the New York Times, last week he announced another round of layoffs, which meant the departure of 10% of the 2,000 people that made up the workforce. Now, the company has a quarter of the staff, because there were 7,500 at the time Elon Musk bought the company. “This is what happens when you fire 90% of the company,” insists another current employee.
Former Twitter workers warn that the layoffs are also affecting content moderation. Speaking to the BBC, the former head of content design explained that all of her team members were fired. Furthermore, an internal investigation of the platform suggests that these security measures reduced trolling by 60%.
According to this medium, targeted harassment campaigns aimed at curbing freedom of expression and foreign influence operations are not being detected either. And there has also been a 69% increase in new accounts following misogynistic and abusive profiles.
Other employees don’t share that idea, according to The Verge. They assure that these technical failures are prior to the arrival of Musk. “There is so much tech debt from Twitter 1.0 that if you make a change right now, everything breaks,” an employee told this outlet.
Regardless of the source of the problem, when Musk took over the company, he promised to drastically improve the speed and stability of the site. But so far he has not achieved it and it is not clear that he can achieve it with a low-minimum squad.
