Twitter’s Photos and Links Completely Crashed Today

Mar 06, 2023

Twitter suffered a major outage as photos and links went offline for all users for an elongated period of time today, while some users reported the entire social network’s site wasn’t functioning.

Trying to click any link or view any photo returned an error message that read, “your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.” For some users, including some staff at PetaPixel, that language was visible when attempting to access any Twitter page, including the homepage.

The full error code was as follows:

{“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}]}

For those who were still able to access the site, photos posted to Twitter directly or those that are embedded as part of its “cards” system were broken.

Engadget reports that for those who still had access to the site, every link on the social media service was broken.

The Verge reports this outage comes only about a week after Elon Musk — the company’s “new” owner and CEO — laid off much of the company’s remaining production team, a round of layoffs that followed the sacking of most of the company’s workers last fall.

Concerns that Twitter would become unstable and eventually collapse have been rising ever since Musk took over and cut a majority of engineering jobs at the social media company. One former employee went so far as to tell The Washington Post that they personally knew of six critical systems that “no longer have any engineers,” and that the social network would “continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”

Despite lacking these people, Twitter seemed to be functioning normally for the majority of the last few months with only a few minor hiccups. For example, Twitter was down for a short time about a month ago as well, which Platformer reported was due to an employee having “inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter.” That explanation doesn’t seem to indicate that the downtime was at all related to what was warned could happen by that former employee, but today’s crash and confusing API warning very well might be.

Update 3/6 @ 9:45 AM: Twitter has acknowledged there is an issue:

“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.”

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.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) March 6, 2023