Twitter

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Twitter Inc. was recovering from its second outage in less than a week, after an “internal change” caused users to get error messages when clicking on links within tweets.

“Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now,” Twitter’s support account wrote in a post on the social media site just after noon New York time on Monday. “We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences.” Less than an hour later, the company tweeted that “things should now be working as normal.”

Twitter owner Elon Musk, who bought the social network late last year for $44 billion and subsequently laid off more than half the staff, posted during the outage that the platform was “brittle.”

More than 10,000 people reported issues with the website at the height of the glitch, according to Downdetector, which tracks website and service outages. TweetDeck, the company’s platform for monitoring and sending posts, also wasn’t working for many people, according to multiple user reports. The number of reports dropped below 500 after 1 p.m. New York time.

Last week, Twitter users had issues loading part of their news feeds. Some received a “Welcome to Twitter” message instead of their usual feed on the “Following” tab, while the “For You” section loaded as normal.

Also, a Twitter employee who was unsure of whether he'd been laid off or not resorted to tweeting at CEO Elon Musk on Monday night, who responded by conducting a public exit interview during which he mocked the ex-staffer and tried to justify not paying him.

After the thread picked up steam, Musk tweeted:“But was he fired? No, you can’t be fired if you weren’t working in the first place!”

The ex-employee, Haraldur Thorleifsson, is based in Iceland and began working at Twitter in 2021 after the social media platform bought his company Ueno to help it design new products. But over a week ago, Thorleifsson’s corporate access to Twitter was cut off after the company conducted another set of layoffs.

The only problem? Thorleifsson said Twitter’s human resources department was unable to confirm whether he still worked at the company, making it unclear if he had been let go or not. So on Monday, he tweeted at Musk, hoping for an answer:"9 days ago the access to my work computer was cut, along with about 200 other Twitter employees. However your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not. You've not answered my emails. Maybe if enough people retweet you'll answer me here?"

In his reply, Musk asked Thorleifsson what he did at the company. Thorleifsson then listed all his efforts to improve design at Twitter and cut costs. Musk, however, was skeptical and dismissive. At one point, he responded with crying laughing emojis. In another reply, Musk posted a scene from the 1999 film Office Space, which shows two consultants interviewing an employee who struggles to justify his position at the company.

Amid this back and forth, Twitter’s HR department reached out to Thorleifsson to confirm he had indeed been fired, Thorleifsson says:“Which is totally ok and it happens all the time. Companies let people go, that's within their rights,” he wrote. However, Thorleifsson is now asking if Twitter will pay him what he’s owed on his contract. “Or, will elonmusk, one of the richest people in the world, try to avoid paying?"

Musk is leaning toward the latter. “The reality is that this guy (who is independently wealthy) did no actual work, claimed as his excuse that he had a disability that prevented him from typing, yet was simultaneously tweeting up a storm. Can’t say I have a lot of respect for that,” Musk tweeted.

The episode comes as Musk has been cutting costs to engineer a financial turnaround at the cash-strapped company. However, a growing number of third-party vendors are accusing Twitter of refusing to pay its bills.

In response to Musk’s tweet, Thorleifsson said he has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair. “I can however write for an hour or two at a time,” he added. “This wasn't a problem in Twitter 1.0 since I was a senior director and my job was mostly to help teams move forward, give them strategic and tactical guidance.”

He’s posted his own tweet thread going over his condition while mocking Musk’s reported requirement of bringing bodyguards everywhere to Twitter’s offices, including to the bathroom:"Oh! I forgot to mention that I read you can't go to the toilet on your own either elonmusk. I'm sorry to hear about that. I know the feeling. The only difference is I can't do it because of a physical disability and you're afraid someone you hurt will attack you while you poop."