Hey, Twitter flamed out again sometime Monday. First, any links you clicked sent you to the Phantom Zone. Then, all gifs and images went black. Wha’ happened? Well, fortunately, Twitter CEO and brain genius Elon Musk is on the case.
Twitter
Musk whined, “This platform is so brittle (sigh).” This is corporate titan-speak for really selling your product. “Will be fixed shortly.” See, Twitter World is just closed for an unspecified period to clean and repair. The Musk out front should’ve told you.
Some users who attempted to load Twitter.com or TweetDeck, a service that allows users to organize their Twitter feed into lists, were met with an error message: “your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.” Other users were able to access the site (although it appeared to load slowly), but they were met with the same error message when clicking on links.
Outage tracker site DownDetector showed more than 8,000 Twitter outage reports around noon on Monday. For users who were able to access the platform, “Twitter API” was trending as people tweeted about the issues.
Twitter’s official account, the one not run by a braying ass, said, “We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences. We’re working on this now and will share an update when it’s fixed.”
Wired writer Aidan Moher explained, “Twitter uses a service to capture analytics data for outbound links (using the t.co domain), and that service lost API access (presumably due to the new system that charges companies API access), so now outbound links aren’t working.”
APIs are software tools third-party developers use to access data from applications and make new services. Last month, Musk, desperate for cash, announced that his $44-billion personal blog would “no longer support free access to the Twitter API.” This did not result in mountains of moolah but instead fucked his site up good.
He further whined Monday afternoon, shortly after smarter people had resolved the issue, “A small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.” Brilliant move blaming the people who fixed Musk’s mess. That will ensure retention.
Independent columnist Ahmed Baba said, “It appears Musk just didn’t understand the dependencies in his tech stack and inadvertently ordered the shutting off of Twitter’s internal access to their own API when trying to cut access to free external users.”
We don’t need to the world’s greatest detective to deduce that Elon Musk is an idiot. He’s like one of those “Star Trek” admirals or commodores who thought they could command the Enterprise better than James T. Kirk.
This was the second Twitter goof-up in less than a week and the third in under a month. Some examples of Musk’s masterful professionalism:
Last Wednesday, some Twitter users who opened up their “for you” timeline were greeted with a blank screen and a message saying, “welcome to your timeline,” encouraging them to follow other users to get tweets to show up even if they already followed various accounts. Other users were met with a “Welcome to Twitter!” message as if they had just joined the platform.
Three weeks ago, Twitter users encountered various issues with the platform, including the inability to tweet, send direct messages or follow new accounts.
But, on the upside, there’s more Nazis on the site!
Republicans have claimed, without evidence, that “wokeness” has compromised military readiness while celebrating all that wonderful “free speech” Musk has brought to Twitter, which the anti-woke crusader is running into the ground.
Follow Stephen Robinson on Twitter if it still exists.
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