Twitter API error broke the site today as Musk blames “brittle” platform

Twitter suffered an embarrassing technology failure today that temporarily broke links to outside websites and even to Twitter’s own webpages. The problem lasted for about 45 minutes or so.

In our tests, clicking any link brought up this 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 that developer link didn’t clear anything up while the problem was still happening because it brought up the same API error message. In addition to news articles and other outbound links, the error message appeared when we tried to click Twitter’s terms of service, privacy policy, cookie policy, and other similar pages. Some images embedded in tweets were broken, and there were reports of TweetDeck being broken too.

We also got the error message when loading any Twitter page in a browser’s incognito mode. It was still possible to view tweets in a browser tab where we were already logged in to Twitter, and the link problem was a trending topic of discussion.

Twitter’s official support account acknowledged the problem before it was fixed. “Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now,” Twitter wrote. “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.”

Musk: Code is “brittle for no good reason”

“This platform is so brittle (sigh). Will be fixed shortly,” CEO Elon Musk wrote. He added later that a “small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”

The “current API plan” part of the error message led to widespread speculation that the problem was related to Twitter’s decision to charge for API access. “Did Twitter forget to subscribe to their own API?” one user asked. “Twitter’s own products are breaking because it ended the free API,” The Information tech reporter Paris Martineau wrote.

We’ll update this article if we get specific details on what caused the link failure. Links on Twitter appear to be working fine now and the Twitter support account confirmed the problem was fixed.

After buying Twitter in October 2022, Musk cut costs by laying off half of Twitter’s staff and terminating thousands of contractors, A Washington Post report in mid-November quoted a former employee as saying layoffs and other departures “have left multiple critical systems down to two, one or even zero engineers.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1922014