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Twitter’s links and pictures were broken, but now they’re not

Twitter’s links and pictures were broken, but now they’re not

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Clicking a link on Twitter got you no further than an error message, and many images across our timelines were failing to load.

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A black Twitter logo over a red and white background
Illustration: Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter had some problems Monday morning — starting just before noon ET, clicking links within tweets didn’t work, and for many people, images wouldn’t load throughout their timelines. It took a little less than an hour for most parts of the site to start working again.

During the partial outage, trying to click a link showed only an error message that said “your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.” People also seemed to get the error when visiting the site in Incognito mode or if they weren’t logged in.

The Twitter Support account said that “an internal change that had some unintended consequences” was to blame. While the issues were happening, some Verge staffers’ Twitter access remained unaffected, while others weren’t even able to load the site.

CEO Elon Musk clarified that it was a “small API change” that had “massive ramifications,” and said that the company’s code stack would likely need to be completely rewritten, because it’s “extremely brittle for no good reason.”

Despite the company’s shrinking workforce, Musk has continued to push for new features, including promising changes that haven’t yet appeared, like last month’s call for ad revenue sharing with creators who post on the platform or a plan to introduce a new paid tier for its API.

This latest outage occurred only about a week after Elon Musk laid off much of the company’s remaining product team, including manager Esther Crawford, in the latest round of cuts since he took ownership of Twitter last fall. Twitter also had a similar outage nearly a month ago, which Platformer reported occurred because “an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter.”

Update March 6th, 1:02PM ET: Updated to reflect that the outage appears to be resolved.

Update March 6th, 3:48PM ET: Added additional comment from Musk.

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