Elon Musk tweeted how Twitter was ‘so brittle’ when the platform experienced a more than one-hour outage that impacted users worldwide.
Users flocked to the social media site Monday to share error messages they had received when attempting to click outbound links.
The issue appeared around 11:30 am ET, impacting the website and app, but was fixed by 12:50 am ET.
One user, who is a computer science professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, believes the ‘error’ is because Twitter is charging itself for API access – ‘but Twitter couldn’t afford to pay.’
Elon Musk’s responded to the outage about one hour after it appeared
Clicking on a link prompted an error message that read: ‘Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.’
Issue reports began to appear on DownDectector, a website that monitors online outages, showing that the outage impacted the website and smartphone app.
Twitter’s API Status Page showed ‘All Systems Operational,’ which is far from what users are experiencing.
The social media platform was loading, but it took a few seconds for feeds to populate – and the same issue was impacting TweetDeck.
It seems the issue was related to Twitter’s switch to a paid API, which the company announced in early February.
The announcement shared it will charge $100 per month for the basic tier of API and is geared toward developers who want to promote on the site.
The phrase ‘Twitter API’ began trending as the issue impacted users and now has more than 60,000 tweets and is still climbing.
One user, who is a computer science professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, believes the ‘error’ is because Twitter is charging itself for API access
Twitter was down worldwide Monday in an outage that blocked outbound links and images in tweets
‘Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences,’ Twitter shared at 12:19 pm ET.
‘We’re working on this now and will share an update when it’s fixed.’
This is the second time Twitter has experienced an outage in a week. The last issues hit the platform on March 1 and lasted three hours.
During this time, users were unable to see their tweets.
The ‘following’ tab, which many people have as their home screen on the social media platform, either malfunctioned or was taken down deliberately.
It came just days after Twitter laid off another 200 employees, around 10 percent of its remaining workforce, in the latest round of job cuts since Elon Musk took over last October.
