Failure to launch: Twitter glitches deal double blow to Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis

Twitter experienced a major outage on Wednesday that impacted high-profile accounts including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The social media platform’s struggles to prevent such incidents are endangering its credibility.

The problem began when Twitter’s API servers failed, preventing some of its automated services from working, including tweet scheduling and automated retweets. This led to scores of Twitter users, including Musk and DeSantis, being locked out of their accounts for more than an hour.

Musk tweeted his frustration with the situation, writing ‘Twitter sucks’ and then made a tongue-in-cheek offer to buy the company.

Governor DeSantis’ account was frozen during a time when he was hosting a press conference to highlight his efforts to combat COVID-19 in Florida.

This incident raises serious concerns about the reliability of social media platforms and comes at a time when the role of such platforms in shaping public opinions is of utmost importance.

The Twitter outage shows us that social media companies need to take the issue of platform reliability more seriously to ensure that events such as these don’t undermine their credibility. Social media has infiltrated every aspect of our lives, from journalism to government communications, and there is a lot at stake.