Twitter CEO Elon Musk on Monday blamed users’ inability to access links and photos on the platform’s “brittle” code stack.
“A small API change had massive ramifications,” Musk tweeted. “The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”
API refers to a set of standardized software instructions that allow machine-to-machine communication. More than half of Twitter’s traffic comes through APIs.
It was the second time on Monday that Musk used the word “brittle” to describe the problem.
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The company, which has experienced an uptick of instability and bugs in recent months after Musk cut its staff sharply, said, “Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences.”
Trying to visit Twitter’s help page Monday led to an error message that says, “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint” and displays a link to a software developer page that also doesn’t work.
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The company tweeted shortly after 10 a.m. Pacific time on Monday that it had addressed the issue.
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According to Downdetector, users first reported the outages shortly before noon U.S. Eastern time. Internet access watchdog NetBlocks said, “Twitter is currently experiencing international slowdowns and outages affecting many users,” and noted that it also affected image and video content. Some users could not see the images that other users were posting.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.