Engadget - Every link on Twitter briefly broke

It's Tuesday, March 07, 2023.

Many Twitter users feared that the platform would fall apart after Musk took over Twitter in October and swiftly fired thousands of employees and contractors. That hasn’t happened yet, but links failing to work, yesterday, is likely connected to the company’s recent tinkering with APIs.

On Monday, links and images completely broke on Twitter for a spell across the company's website and mobile apps. "Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences," Twitter shared on its Support account at 12:19 PM ET, Monday. It took roughly less than an hour for most of the social network to start working again.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted: "A small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite." Twitter is restricting its APIs, the tools developers use to hook into the platform, and the company said it would start charging for access to them in early February.

Clicking on a link raised an error message that read: "Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information." That link was also broken for a while.

– Mat Smith

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