Twitter's Links and Pics Are Boinked [Update: It’s 'Fixed']
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Twitter broke...again.
For a period of time on Monday, Twitter was, once again, not working very well. The site has faced an increasing number of technical snafus since Elon Musk took over the platform in October 2022, and began gutting the company’s staff in multiple rounds of layoffs.
In the most recent “whoopsie,” external links posted to the site did not lead to where they were intended to go. Instead clicking on a linked web article directed users to an error message coded “467". “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information,” the notice read.
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Additionally, photos posted to the platform weren’t displaying correctly. “An error occurred loading this image,” a separate error message said. As a result, people’s timelines were flooded with gray and brown boxes, broken links, and tweets commenting on those boxes and broken links. Gizmodo tried to embed a few tweets referencing and demonstrating the issue in this post, but the content initially would not load normally. Instead, here are a couple of screenshots of what happened:
A screenshot demonstrating what appeared in lieu of posted photo content.
The error message that displayed when a user-posted link is clicked.
Twitter’s entire developer site also appeared to go down, displaying the same error message. Attempting to log out of the platform also directed users to the error according to at least one user report on the site, from a computer science professor. Gizmodo verified that logging out of Twitter on a mobile browser resulted in the API error message, and it was impossible to log back in for about 30 minutes.
Note: sponsored links and multimedia content posted in advertisements seemed unaffected by whatever was going on at Twitter. So, you could still successfully click on ads. Earlier this year, Elon Musk promised to close off the free tier of Twitter’s Application Programming Interface (API).
Gizmodo reached out to Twitter Support’s official company account on the platform for an explanation but did not immediately receive a response. At 12:19 p.m. ET, Twitter Support posted that “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.”
About an hour later, the Support account posted, “Things should now be working as normal. Thanks for sticking with us!”
Things should now be working as normal. Thanks for sticking with us! https://t.co/JXTllrv0k0
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) March 6, 2023
Just last week, Twitter appeared to suffer a total outage, that left users unable to load anything on their feeds on Wednesday. Earlier in February, Twitter’s mobile app went down for a few hours. These types of disruptions and more have seemed to become more common in the wake of Musk’s takeover—which is understandable considering he’s scrapped more than three-quarters of the company’s former staff.
That the linked content error notice related to Twitter’s API (application program interface) is not particularly surprising. Under Musk’s direction, the platform has moved to lock down who has access to the site’s back-end interface and to further monetize API access. The platform has also moved to monetize such features as two-factor authentication in its push to become profitable. It’s possible an error occurred while Twitter coders were working on API access changes.
On top of the ongoing issues with Twitter, competing social media platform, Mastodon, also noted it was experiencing an outage on Monday. Mastodon’s site currently displays a notice about a “major outage,” that it is attributing to a “massive DDoS attack.” “We are working together with Fastly to mitigate it,” the error message reads.
Mastodon attributed its own outage to an attack, but the site likely also received a spike in genuine user traffic following the Twitter problems.
Gizmodo reached out to Mastodon to clarify whether the issue could be related to an influx of users from Twitter and a spokesperson told us, “no, it is a confirmed attack.”
This article is part of a developing story. Our writers and editors will be updating this page as new information is released. Please check back again in a few minutes to see the latest updates. Meanwhile, if you want more news coverage, check out our tech, science, or io9 front pages. And you can always see the most recent Gizmodo news stories at gizmodo.com/latest.
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