Romain Rouillard 5:01 p.m., March 07, 2023

This Monday evening, it was impossible to open a link on Twitter and the visuals posted by users failed to display.

A new bug which this time was caused by a single engineer whose "mishandling" would have been enough to break down the network.

A blunder that questions the current stability of the platform.

New dysfunctions appeared on Twitter on Monday evening.

Regularly affected in recent weeks by various and varied bugs, the network experienced new ones a few hours ago.

This time, no published photos managed to load and it was also impossible to open a link from the platform.

"Some features of Twitter may not work as expected at this time. We have made an internal change which has had unintended consequences," the network's support account tweeted at the time.

This Tuesday, the Platformer site reports that this breakdown would have originated from a false manipulation committed by … a single engineer left to himself. 

Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now.

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.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) March 6, 2023

As BFMTV relays, the employee in question had the mission of removing free access to the API, Twitter's application programming interface.

This feature allows you to create profiles in an automated way, capable of publishing tweets according to events defined beforehand.

Previously accessible to all, this device was made payable by billionaire Elon Musk, the new boss of the platform. 

A new bug linked to massive layoffs at Twitter? 

Monday evening, this engineer alone at the helm, according to Platformer, made a mistake when entering information, thus crashing the entire network.

In the opinion of many Twitter employees, this kind of incident is directly linked to the policy pursued by Elon Musk within the company.

Upon his arrival at the head of the platform last October, the founder of SpaceX embarked on a major dismissal campaign, the consequences of which are beginning to appear in broad daylight.

In a survey published by the BBC on Monday, one respondent confident in particular that a person "totally new and without expertise [did] what was previously done by more than 20 people". 

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A just-in-time organization responsible, according to employees, for the proliferation of bugs on the platform.

According to Platformer, Monday night's outage would already be the sixth since the start of the calendar year.

In addition to these temporary but repetitive malfunctions, the BBC investigation also raised serious content moderation issues on the platform.

Hate messages or fake news would therefore tend to proliferate freely on Twitter, for which the year 2023 begins in a very eventful way.