The Twitter splash page is seen on a digital device, Monday, April 25, 2022, in San Diego. Twitter users were greeted early Saturday, Feb. 18, 2023 with an ultimatum from the social media app: Subscribe to the platform's new premium service or lose a popular account security feature. A pop-up message warned users they will lose the ability to secure access to their account via text message two-factor authentication unless they pay $8 a month to subscribe to Twitter Blue. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File)
Twitter experienced a bevy of glitches 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 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.”
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.
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 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 Associated Press 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.
