Twitter experienced a bevy of glitches Monday for a time being as links stopped working, some users were unable to log in and images were not loading for others.
The company, which has experienced an uptick instability and bugs in recent months after Elon Musk cut its staff sharply, said “Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. 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.”
For about an hour Monday, trying to visit Twitter’s help page led to an error message that says “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint” and displayed a link to a software developer page that also didn’t work. As of just before 1 p.m., the site appeared to be back up and working.
According to Downdetector, users began reporting the outages shortly before noon. Internet access watchdog NetBlocks said, “Twitter is currently experiencing international slowdowns and outages affecting many users,” and noted that it was also affecting image and video content. Some users were not able to see the images that other users were posting.
Twitter engineers and experts have been warning that the platform is at an increased risk of fraying since Musk fired most of the people who worked on keeping it running. Just last month, a bug left users unable to send tweets.
Already in November, engineers who left Twitter described for The why they expect considerable unpleasantness for Twitter’s more than 230 million users now that well over two-thirds of the San Francisco-based company’s pre-Musk core services engineers are apparently gone.
While they don’t anticipate near-term collapse, the engineers said Twitter could get very rough at the edges — especially if Musk makes major changes without much off-platform testing.
