Twitter’s website was inaccessible for many users on Monday while others reported issues seeing photos and clicking through links in the app, marking one of the most wide-ranging service disruptions to date under new owner Elon Musk.
Some users who attempted to load Twitter.com or TweetDeck, a service that allows users to organize their Twitter feed into lists, were met with an error message: “your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.” Other users were able to access the site (although it appeared to load slowly), but they were met with the same error message when clicking on links.
Outage tracker site DownDetector showed more than 8,000 Twitter outage reports around noon on Monday. For users who were able to access the platform, “Twitter API” was trending as people tweeted about the issues.
“Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now,” the company said in a tweet.
“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.”
In a separate tweet on Monday, Musk said: “This platform is so brittle (sigh). Will be fixed shortly.”
Within about an hour, the issues appeared to have largely resolved. “Things should now be working as normal,” the company tweeted around 1 pm ET.
Monday’s outage marked the second Twitter glitch in less than a week and the third in under a month. Last Wednesday, some Twitter users who opened up their “for you” timeline were greeted with a blank screen and a message saying, “welcome to your timeline,” encouraging them to follow other users to get tweets to show up even if they already followed various accounts. Other users were met with a “Welcome to Twitter!” message as if they had just joined the platform.
Three weeks ago, Twitter users encountered various issues with the platform, including the inability to tweet, send direct messages or follow new accounts.
Twitter has experienced a range of technical glitches since Musk took over the company and laid off more than half its staff late last year. Users have previously reported issues with the app’s two-factor authentication tool, seeing replies listed above a tweet rather than below it and seeing old tweets show up repeatedly in their feed or mentions.
Some former employees raised concerns that the mass layoffs under Musk could cause the platform to break in big or small ways, after workers with knowledge of Twitter’s key systems were ousted. But Musk has continued to cut staff in an effort to boost Twitter’s bottom line.
The latest service disruptions come after Twitter reportedly laid off another 10 per cent of its staff late last month, including some engineers responsible for site reliability, according to a report from the New York Times.
