Twitter outages are on the rise amid Elon Musk job cuts

Twitter and Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

In an email to employees on Monday, which was seen by The New York Times, Mr Musk said the weekend layoffs were “a difficult organizational overhaul focused on improving future execution”. He said those still in the business would receive “very significant stock and other compensation awards” on March 24.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Twitter was known for its regular failures and its “Fail Whale”, an image of a whale being airlifted by a flock of birds that appeared when the site was down. . Over the years, the company has added hundreds of people to its infrastructure teams and improved its server technology to mitigate outages, three current and former engineers said.

After Mr. Musk took over the company, layoffs began, followed by more substantial changes to back-end technology. On December 24, Twitter shut down a data center in Sacramento that had helped handle much of the web traffic to the service. That left Twitter with just two other facilities, in Atlanta and Portland, Ore.

Four days later, Twitter experienced a widespread outage, with some users being logged out of the service or unable to see replies to their tweets.

Employee errors led to further breakdowns. In early February, a Twitter employee deleted data from an internal service designed to prevent spam, leading to an issue that prevented many people from tweeting or messaging each other, according to three people close to the company. ‘incident.

Twitter engineers took several hours to diagnose the problem and restore the stored data with a backup. At that time, users were getting error messages saying they couldn’t tweet because they had already posted too much. The Platformer newsletter previously reported the cause of the issue.

A week later, an engineer testing a change to users’ Twitter profiles on Apple mobile devices caused another temporary outage. The engineer ignored a past practice of testing new features on small subsets of users and simply rolled out the change – an adjustment for Spaces, Twitter’s live audio service – to a wide range of users. , said two people familiar with the move.