Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images; John Shearer/WireImage
- Twitter appeared to suffer another outage on Monday, as users were logged out of the platform.
- The issue continued during the Met Gala, a typically high-traffic event as users discuss celebrity fashion.
- The glitch was caused by a "bad front-end deployment" according to a NYT technology reporter.
Twitter appeared to suffer another glitch on Monday, as desktop users reported being repeatedly logged out of the platform.
Downdetector, which lets users self-report issues, peaked at 4,143 reports just after 4 p.m. ET – a couple hours before celebrities arrived on the red carpet for the Met Gala. The amount of problem reports didn't return to normal until just after midnight.
"It seems less than ideal that Twitter is logging people out who use the service on desktop during the Met Gala, a traditionally high-traffic event for the platform," New York Times technology reporter Ryan Mac tweeted.
The star-studded gala organized by Vogue typically attracts vast commentary as celebrities are outfitted in haute couture fashion, with this year's theme honoring designer Karl Lagerfeld.
Jared Leto's cat costume; the appearance of a cockroach; and Vogue editor Anna Wintour's apparent relationship with Bill Nighy were all hot topics of conversation on Twitter alongside the usual sartorial critiques.
Mac later reported that the outage was caused by "a bad front-end deployment," meaning Twitter staff tried to release a visual change to the platform's interface but its release caused unintended problems.
"[Elon] Musk sent an internal email earlier noting that though development is going fast 'system reliability should always be paramount,'" he added.
—Ryan Mac 🙃 (@RMac18) May 2, 2023
The same day, numerous Twitter users also reported that they were able to restore their legacy-verified blue checkmarks by changing their bio to include a phrase such as "blue tick," or "former blue check mark" but this was only visible to the user and disappeared within 30 minutes.
In February, Twitter suffered an outage during another high-traffic event, the Super Bowl halftime show. That was despite Musk emailing all staff just days earlier to tell them to stop developing new features "in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up," Fortune reported.
That directive came as a result of one "massive" outage which left users unable to tweet because they were mistakenly told they were over the daily posting limit.
According to Platformer, it happened because a Twitter employee accidentally deleted important data, and there was nobody left on the team responsible.
The company's workforce is 80% smaller since Musk took over last October, due to several rounds of layoffs as well as resignations and controversial firings.
Insider contacted Twitter for comment. The company responded with an automated message that didn't address the inquiry.