Twitter has been hit by a major bug, preventing users from leaving the site or viewing images.
It’s just the latest technical issue to hit Twitter, which recently went through another round of layoffs – and then experienced another outage.
This time, the site remained operational, but users who clicked on links were instead presented with a lengthy error message indicating a problem with Twitter’s API, the system used to communicate with other services.
This means that any links shared on the site cannot be followed. Links appeared as blank blocks of colour as well.
As a result of the same issues, Tweetdeck, the company’s more specialised service for following tweets, appeared to be down. Users reported that the app went completely blank at the same time that the links broke.
Twitter has been making changes to its API in recent weeks, ostensibly to generate more revenue. The company recently announced that it would significantly reduce free API support, effectively killing off third-party services that rely on it, such as third-party Twitter clients.
The company had promised that a new service would be “coming very soon” in a tweet posted on 26 February from its account focused on developers. It’s possible that the latest issues are the result of the long-awaited release of that new API.
Twitter had previously said that it had seen “an immense amount of enthusiasm for the upcoming changes with Twitter API”, but that it would be delaying its launch “for a few days”. In that announcement, posted on 13 February, it promised that there would be “more information to follow in the coming days”.
Four days later, it posted another update stating that its “previous updates still stand,” though it was unclear when it would be implemented.
Twitter may have ended API access without informing anyone, thereby breaking all of its own systems that rely on access to that API.
When users click on links on Twitter, they are not immediately taken to the URL that they have clicked on. Instead, they are routed through Twitter’s servers before reaching the link, so a Twitter outage can disrupt all outbound traffic from the site.
Twitter has yet to comment on the incident, and its public relations team has been largely disbanded since new owner Elon Musk took over the company. Mr Musk did not immediately tweet about the issue, instead responding to several other users.
Mr Musk responded to some of the tweets with links. It is unclear whether he was also affected by the problem.
