UPDATED, 1:06 p.m. ET: Twitter was again experiencing widespread technical issues, returning an odd error message to users who tried to click on links in tweets to third-party websites for nearly an hour Monday.
“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 error message read for users who attempted to click on web links. The error message also referenced “code 467.” During the outage, visiting the URL in the error message showed the same error message.
The Twitter Support team in a tweet Monday at 12:19 p.m. ET said, “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.” The problem appeared to be resolved around 12:50 p.m. ET, and Twitter Support at 1:05 p.m. ET posted, “Things should now be working as normal.”
After Twitter fixed the glitch, company owner Elon Musk tweeted that, “A small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”
Last month, Twitter announced that as of Feb. 9 it would begin charging developers a monthly fee to let their apps access its API (application programming interface). Musk had claimed that the “free API is being abused right now by bot scammers & opinion manipulators.” Twitter said it would charge developers a monthly API access fee starting at $100/month for basic access. That came after the company — without warning — in January had made a change that disabled Twitter access for multiple third-party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterrific.
The latest technical problems with Twitter have cropped up a little over four months after Musk, the multibillionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, closed a debt-heavy $44 billion deal to acquire the company.
Under his ownership, Musk has dramatically slashed Twitter’s workforce to reduce costs. The company had about 7,500 employees when Musk took over, and it is now estimated to have fewer than 2,000. Late last month, Twitter laid off “at least” 200 more staffers, which represented 10% of the company’s approximately 2,000 remaining employees, the New York Times reported.
Twitter’s API status page did not report any issues or problems as of Monday, with a notice that said “all systems operational.”
