One person changed the code to crash Twitter, Musk was mad: all rewritten!

The fish and sheep are rich in color from the temple of Wofei

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"Musk is mad"!

Just today, Twitter broke down again, and the pictures and any links could not be opened.

According to Musk himself, the reason is just "a small change to the API."

But the consequences are serious, at least in the eyes of netizens, the scene of Twitter is Aunt Sauce:

And the mood of the melon-eating masses is:

It's not that netizens are too mean, it's just that this thing does mean to give back.

According to Platformer, the problem is that third-party clients access Twitter's API. In early February, Musk decided not to open the API for free and change to a fee-based model.

Then this code has to be changed, but goose, there is only one engineer in charge of this.

The Verge said directly and mercilessly: This is all the pot of Musk's massive layoffs, and Twitter now has too few engineers.

And netizens are even more ridiculed:

Apart from the children in the nursery, there are no more people left on Twitter to conduct tests.

Internal employees revealed that Musk was indeed angry. However, Iron Man does not seem to be willing to back the pot on the outside button, but feels that "the Twitter code is too fragile", and released cruel words again:

Twitter's code had to be rewritten.

An engineer crashes Twitter

Let's start at the beginning.

Twitter netizens who surfed early in the morning suddenly found that the Twitter link could not be opened.

Not only does it not open, it also tells you that the cause of the error is "Your current API does not include access to this breakpoint".

To translate simply, Twitter's own API does not recognize Twitter...

As for the specific reason, according to Musk, it is that they made some changes to the code of the API, and as a result, the entire Twitter collapsed.

Platformer learned more details from internal employees: the same API Musk announced on February 1 that he would switch from free to charged. This change directly brought Twitter's third-party client to an end at the time.

In a more outrageous detail, internal employees told Platformer that only one SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) engineer was responsible for the Twitter API change to fees.

As a result, just after the engineer made a "bad configuration change," the API was "largely broken." This paralyzed many of Twitter's internal tools and public-facing services.

This Musk, who, as he said in his tweet, "for no reason, Twitter's code is too fragile."

The boss was angry, so the internal Slack (communication software) was instantly packed with Twitter programmers' crazy firefighting threads.

Apparently, Musk thinks Twitter's code is a shit. But whether it is really "for no reason", there is no lack of different opinions from the outside.

Earlier, a former Twitter employee told the Washington Post that after Musk took over Twitter and laid off employees significantly, Twitter's code has long been a tightrope walking:

Any error in code and operations is now fatal.

Those who stay on Twitter will be overwhelmed and therefore more likely to make mistakes.

Twitter with a twist of flowers

In fact, this year has only arrived in March, and Musk's Twitter has already crashed 6 times on a large scale.

First, on January 23, some Android users were "backstabbed" and could not view their watchlists, load tweets, and send tweets, and everyone waited about 4 hours to return to normal.

Image source: 9to5Google

A few days later, on February 8, many users found themselves unable to forward and send tweets because they were prompted by the system to "exceed the limit of the number of messages sent per day", which took about 1.5 hours to fix.

Then, on February 15, it was the turn of iOS users that the For You module failed to load.

Soon, 3 days later, on February 18, the problem was even more serious, even the homepage collapsed, the notification of the reply message was not reminded, and various other errors flew all over the screen, making netizens wonder whether Twitter was "closed" (the topic of "#TwitterDown" directly fired).

Finally, on March 1st, the watchlist and recommendations for you crashed again.

Coupled with the fact that today's images and links are inaccessible, Twitter's crash can be described as varied.

——And "homely meals" to the point that everyone has mastered the skills of eating melons.

Such as Twitter's own employees:

We are all already numb.

Such as foreign media:

Wait, it is estimated that the next crash is on the way again.

To ask, why is this? In the eyes of the outside world, no matter how Musk dumps the pot, it is difficult to escape responsibility - who told him to lay people off.

As soon as the acquisition was completed last year, Musk opened the "extreme hardcore" culture of Twitter 2.0 and sent away thousands of people.

Later, a lot of "small actions" came sparsely, resulting in the large factory that originally had more than 7,500 employees, but finally lost 80%, leaving only about 1,300 people.

Among them, there are less than 550 full-time engineers (data from CNBC).

An anonymous engineer from Twitter expressed concern:

Twitter's codebase is huge, and various parts of the site need to be maintained by people who know different programming languages. There are barriers between these skills, and it's not easy to "migrate" between sites, so after losing so many people at once, it's hard to train new engineers.

I don't know if Musk thought about this problem when he was crazy about layoffs.

But maybe he thought about it, but he still "can't manage so much" - after all, in addition to highlighting the hardcore culture, the most important thing in his operation is to cut costs and make up for the $44 billion hole.

This is not only about layoffs, but also about launching paid certification services, canceling free lunches, firing cleaners, arrears of office rent, and supplier marketing payments.

Twitter San Francisco headquarters building, photo by Frank Schulenburg

If there are too many slots, they will not be expanded one by one.

But don't think that's the end of it.

In the past two days, anonymous employees have broken the news to The Insider, and Musk even tried to sell office equipment to employees.

In short, Twitter's chicken fly dog jump continues.

Some netizens suggested that the tweet explaining "something unexpected happened" should be at the top for a long time.

As for when, this horse-grabbing drama will return to calm, maybe it is when Musk really overturns Twitter and reconstructs it...