Twitter glitches as links, images fail to load

PTI, Mar 7, 2023, 8:13 AM IST

Representative image (Source: Pinterest)

San Francisco: Twitter experienced a bevy of glitches for over an hour Monday 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 of 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.”

Trying to visit Twitter’s help page Monday led to an error message that says “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint” and displays a link to a software developer page that also doesn’t work.

Musk tweeted Monday: “This platform is so brittle (sigh). Will be fixed shortly.” The company tweeted shortly after 10 a.m. Pacific time on Monday that it had addressed the issue.

According to Downdetector, users began reporting the outages shortly before noon U.S. Eastern time. 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 warned that the platform is at an increased risk of fraying since Musk fired most of the people who worked on keeping it running. Last month, a bug left users unable to send tweets.

In November, engineers who left Twitter described for The Associated Press why they expect a bumpy road for Twitter’s more than 230 million users now that well over two-thirds of the San Francisco company’s pre-Musk core services engineers are gone.

While they don’t anticipate near-term collapse, the engineers said Twitter could become very rough at the edges — especially if Musk makes major changes without much off-platform testing.