Many users were unable to access Twitter’s website Monday, while others reported problems viewing photos and clicking on links in the app, marking one of the most far-reaching service outages recorded to date under new owner Elon Musk’s tenure.
Some users who tried to load Twitter.com or TweetDeck, a service that allows users to organize their Twitter content 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 seemed to load slowly), but encountered the same error message when clicking on links.
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Crash tracking site DownDetector showed more than 8,000 reports of Twitter crashes around noon on Monday. For users who could access the platform, “Twitter API” was trending as people tweeted about the problems.
“Some parts of Twitter may not work as we expected,” 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 Monday, Musk said, “This platform is very fragile (sigh). It will be fixed shortly.”
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Monday’s crash is the second Twitter failure in less than a week and the third in less than a month. Last Wednesday, some Twitter users who opened their “for you” timeline were met with a blank screen and a message saying “welcome to your timeline,” encouraging them to follow other users so that tweets would appear even if they already followed multiple accounts. Other users were met with a “Welcome to Twitter!” message, as if they had just joined the platform.
Three weeks ago, Twitter users experienced several problems with the platform, including the inability to tweet, send direct messages or follow new accounts.
Twitter has experienced a number of technical glitches since Musk took over the company and laid off more than half of its staff late last year. Users had already reported problems with the app’s two-factor authentication tool, as well as replies appearing above a tweet instead of below it and old tweets appearing repeatedly in their feed or mentions.
Some former employees feared that Musk’s mass layoffs could more or less break the platform, following the dismissal of workers with knowledge of Twitter’s key systems. But Musk has continued to cut staff in an effort to boost Twitter’s profitability.
Wednesday’s service outage comes after Twitter laid off another 10% of its workforce earlier in the week, including some engineers responsible for the site’s reliability, according to a New York Times report.
It is unclear what caused Wednesday’s apparent service crash. Twitter, which eliminated much of its media relations staff last year, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the matter.