Twitter outage which affected links and images traced to API issues

Users reported noticing an error message which popped up any time they clicked on links and images on Twitter posts.

The message 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."

Users on TweetDeck also reported seeing similar messages while the platform was down. While the downtime lasted for just some hours, it was later revealed that the outage was caused due to an issue with the platform's API.

Recall ever since billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter, there has been chaos in the management style as systems have been tweaked, the platform’s best brains fired and a lot of adjustments done to the platform's internal operations system.

In February 2023, Musk came up with an idea to make developers pay Twitter to be able to use its API.

According to a statement by Twitter, the platform would no longer support free access to its API from February 9th. It also confirmed both versions 1.1 and 2 would have a "paid basic tier" instead.

A few minutes after the outage was reported across the board, Twitter put up a message on its support account intimating users of the development.

"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."

This downtime comes less than a week after the platform suffered a major outage which many industry watchers have linked to the mass sack recently carried out on Twitter.

According to Endgadget.com, Twitter’s communications department may no longer be functioning optimally after the company laid off hundreds of staff thus they have been delays in communication as nobody can be reached for comments on the issue.

The Verge also reported that due to the mass sack on the platform, only one site reliability engineer has been positioned to fix the API issue and this turned out to be a bad idea as the engineer was at the centre of the mistake which caused the outage.

According to The Verge, the engineer had made a “bad configuration change” that “basically broke the Twitter API,”. The future looks bleak for Twitter as most of the sacked employees have continued to forecast doom for the company after Musk took over.

The sacked employees according to The Washington Post mentioned that they are aware of six critical systems that "no longer have any engineers." They also revealed that although the platform was still running, it may eventually hit a brick wall and then stop functioning eventually.