(San Francisco) Internet links, which refer users to other pages and content on the web, did not work for half an hour on Monday on Twitter, Elon Musk’s social network, which has been chaining failures since several weeks, found AFP and many users.
Twitter, whose workforce has been drastically reduced by the multi-billionaire, had warned earlier of the risk of malfunction after an “internal change”.
“Aspects of Twitter may not work as expected at this time. We made an internal change that had unintended consequences. We’re working on it and will let you know when it’s fixed,” the official @TwitterSupport account said at 12:20 p.m. EST Monday morning in San Francisco.
Half an hour later, the links were working again and reports on the specialized site Downdetector were down, having climbed to more than 8,000.
During the outage, internet links led to a blank page with a brief message at the top: “Your current API does not include access to this page. »
The API is the interface that a platform makes available to IT developers to create tools on this service, such as Tweetdeck in the case of Twitter.
The Californian company had indicated last month that access to its API would soon no longer be free.
“A small change to the API can have massive consequences. The architecture of the computer code is extremely fragile, for no apparent reason. It will have to be completely rewritten at some point,” Elon Musk tweeted in response to a tweet about the outage.
The boss of Tesla and SpaceX bought Twitter at the end of October for 44 billion dollars. He immediately laid off half the staff and has continued to fire many engineers ever since to save money.
The San Francisco-based company now has fewer than 2,000 employees, down from 7,500 four months ago, according to estimates from the New York Times and other specialized media such as The Information.
According to Insider Intelligence, the social network, which had more than 368 million monthly users worldwide last year, will lose some 32 million between 2022 and 2024, put off by the proliferation of toxic content or by the increase in number of breakdowns.
With the departure of many brands, the social network saw its turnover and its adjusted profit fall by around 40% year on year in December, reported on Saturday the wall street journalciting people familiar with the matter.
Twitter “is locked in a death spiral as hundreds of advertisers have joined the mass exodus from the platform out of fear that their branding will be associated with that of white supremacists, misogynists and conspiracy seekers,” it said. Jessica González, co-leader of the NGO Free Press and the coalition of associations #StopToxicTwitter, quoted in a press release on Monday.
This coalition calls on brands to no longer pay for advertisements on the social network since its takeover by Elon Musk, who defends an almost absolutist vision of freedom of expression.
She sent letters to the American groups Anheuser-Busch (beer producer) and Apple on Monday, accusing them of continuing to spend “millions of dollars” on Twitter.