Twitter Users Outraged as Links, Images Stop Working — And Elon Tweets ‘This Platform Is So Brittle’

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

Twitter had a weird and frustrating technical glitch Monday, as users experienced problems accessing links to websites and viewing images. Meanwhile, the self-described “Chief Twit” who fired the majority of his staff after buying the company last year complained in a tweet that the platform was “so brittle.”

It’s not completely clear what exactly fell apart with Twitter’s behind-the-scenes technological infrastructure — your friendly neighborhood Mediaite contributing editor is wondering if the entire social media platform is powered by a geriatric hamster attempting to run on a rusty wheel — but for several hours Monday, several Twitter functions were, well, nonfunctional.

Any time a Twitter user attempted to click on a link, they were sent to a white screen, blank except for some text that listed an error message that “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint,” and a link to a page on the Twitter developer site. (Below is a screenshot from my iPhone earlier today when I attempted to click on a Mediaite link in one of our tweets.)

Screenshot via Twitter.

In January, Twitter suddenly cut off access to its application programming interface (API) for a number of popular third-party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific, and then officially announced in February that it would start charging developers a monthly fee to access the API.

At the time, Twitter owner Elon Musk claimed that the “free API is being abused right now by bot scammers & opinion manipulators,” but many Twitter users lamented the loss of apps they had used for years and questioned how widespread the “bot” problem — a complaint Musk had unsuccessfully raised back when he was attempting to weasel out of his contract to buy Twitter — really was.

Musk responded to one single user’s tweet about the tech problems (a user whose bio brags he was banned from Twitter in 2020 before being “Freed by Elon Musk 2022”) by complaining again about his own company, the very company where he personally made the decision to fire vast swaths of his staff, the very employees who possessed years-long experience and detailed knowledge of the coding and systems that keep the social media platform functioning for millions of users 24 hours a day.

“This platform is so brittle (sigh),” tweeted Musk, promising it “[w]ill be fixed shortly.”

A few minutes before Musk’s tweet, the @TwitterSupport account had acknowledged a problem was occurring. “Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now,” the account wrote. “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.”

As traditionally happens, Twitter users complained on Twitter about the Twitter problems, sending phrases like “Twitter API,” “Twitter HQ,” and “#TwitterDown” trending at various points in the early afternoon.

https://twitter.com/Eve6/status/1632792059819229185?s=20

The loss of functionality of images also resulted in a resurgence of ASCII art. For you whippersnappers among our readers who are too young to remember the early days of the internet, that’s using computer text characters to form images.

“Things should now be working as normal. Thanks for sticking with us!” the @TwitterSupport tweeted almost an hour after their initial message about the problem, a chipper message that was met with sharp skepticism.

https://twitter.com/cbanksburner/status/1632804700859817995?s=20

UPDATE 5:00 pm ET: According to a report by Casey Newton and Zoë Schiffer at Platformer, Twitter’s tech woes were because “its migration to a paid API has a single site reliability engineer attached to it.”

One. Single. Site reliability. Engineer.

From the Platformer report:

But in a sign of just how deep Elon Musk’s cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we’re told. On Monday, the engineer made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,” according to a current employee.

The change had cascading consequences inside the company, bringing down much of Twitter’s internal tools along with the public-facing APIs. On Slack, engineers responded with variations of “crap” and “Twitter is down – the entire thing” as they scrambled to fix the problem.

The article also noted how many observers were drawing a direct connection between the tech problems and Musk’s mass firings, noting how former Twitter employees have predicted that the significantly reduced workforce would make Twitter “increasingly vulnerable to catastrophic outages” — with six such notable outages occurring so far just this year.