UPDATE: Twitter seems to have resolved the outage, which Elon Musk is blaming on a "small API change" that caused the social media service to go haywire. "A small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite," he wrote in a tweet.
Original story:
An outage across Twitter is preventing users from visiting links or seeing photos and videos on the social media service.
The outage appears to have begun around 9 a.m. PST. That’s when users noticed visiting links posted to tweets could trigger an error message involving Twitter’s API, which lets third-party apps and services connect to the platform.
"Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information','code':467,” the error message reads.
At the same time, Twitter has been failing to show images and videos uploaded to user tweets. Instead, the posts will merely show a blank, colored box. Netblocks, an internet watchdog, confirms the outage appears to be affecting users across the globe.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk is aware of the outage. “This platform is so brittle (sigh). Will be fixed shortly,” he said in a tweet. Ironically, visiting his Twitter profile can also trigger the same error message about the API.
The company's support team adds: "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."
The outage may be connected to Twitter’s recent decision to end free access to the company’s API by instead charging users $100 per month. It also comes Musk has laid off or fired a majority of Twitter employees and shut down certain offices and data centers to save on costs. That’s sparked concerns Twitter lacks the staff and capacity to maintain the social media platform.
Last month, the company experienced another outage that prevented users from tweeting, and triggered an error message that read: "You are over the daily limit for sending tweets." The outage was reportedly due to an employee accidentally deleting data from an internal service.