'Brittle' Twitter Suffers Bad Case Of The Mondays: Links, Pics, Vids Fail

Elon Musk's Twitter got off to a bad start on Monday when it introduced further unexpected changes in the form of broken links and images.

Starting around 0830 Pacific Time, according to DownDetector, clicking on links in Twitter posts resulted in an error message:

{"errors":[{"message":"Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information","code":467}]}

Clicking on images produced a similar error. And users reported that videos and TweetDeck were also broken, not to mention t.co, the biz's link shortening service. Meanwhile, page load times appeared to have increased significantly.

"Twitter that is broken enough to joke about but just functional enough that we can joke about it *on twitter* is the platonic ideal of hardcore software," quipped Benedict Evans, a technology analyst, via the unstable social media site.

"The icing on the cake is that everyone is posting screenshots of the error message, but images are also broken," wrote Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University.

The company's notional API status page showed no sign anything is amiss. "All systems operational," the page confidently declared on Monday morning.

Twitter, which says it has more than 230 million daily active users, has no public relations department since the mass layoffs so there's no one to ask about the intermittent errors. And attempting to click on the Twitter Comms account of yore also returned an error.

Musk, busy running five companies, at 0923 acknowledged the issue and promised to address it.

"This platform is so brittle (sigh). Will be fixed shortly," he wrote using his very own social media service.

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A visit to Twitter Support at 0943 produced a similar error. But earlier, at 0919, the account proclaimed, "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."

The deep and repeated staff cuts at Twitter following Musk's purchase of the bird site in October elicited concern among technical types that the social media network would collapse for lack of engineering ministrations.

That hasn't happened yet but technical problems continue to dog the service. Users reported widespread problems less than a week ago, an incident that also not mentioned on Twitter's status page.

Availability problems also surfaced at the beginning of February, and in that instance, yet again, Twitter's status page gave no indication of any problems.

On a related note, more than half of Twitter top 1,000 advertisers have reportedly stopped buying ads on the social media platform.

At the time this story was filed, things appeared to be on the mend, but problems are still being reported by a few users. ®

PS: Twitter insiders claim the biz is no longer able to effectively tackle trolling, state-backed disinformation, and child exploitation, following layoffs, overhauls, and cut backs under Elon Musk.