On Monday, Twitter's website and mobile apps were all completely broken, including all links and photos due to an API issue.
Links in tweets were broken, and for many users, images would not load on their timelines as well, The Verge reports.
Twitter Has Addressed The Issue Immediately
While trying to click a link during the partial outage, only the error notice "your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint" appeared.
Users also appeared to experience the issue if they used Incognito mode or were not logged in to the website.
At approximately 12:43 PM ET, links appeared to be functioning once again, and images were beginning to reappear in the timeline.
An "internal change that had some unintended consequences," according to the Twitter Help account, was to blame.
Elon Musk, the CEO of Twitter, explained that although it was only a modest API change, it had far-reaching effects.
The company's code stack, he added, is "extremely brittle for no good reason," therefore it would probably need to be totally redone.
According to Engadget, less than a week ago, just days after the business let rid of hundreds more employees, there was also a significant outage on Twitter.
However, there is no longer a communications team at Twitter that can be reached for comment regarding the matter.
Twitter said in early February that it will start charging for access to APIs, thus the business is already restricting the tools that developers use to tap into the platform.
Musk has persisted in pushing for new features despite the company's declining staff, including anticipated improvements that have not yet materialized.
This is similar to the request made last month for authors who post on the site to share in advertising revenue or the idea to add a new paid tier to its API.
Read More: Twitter Launches Updated Violent Speech Policy
The Turbulent Leadership Seems To Be Causing Twitter To Perform Subpar
This most recent outage happened just a week or so after Musk fired the majority of the surviving staff, including manager Esther Crawford, in the most recent round of layoffs since he acquired Twitter last autumn.
Nearly a month prior, Twitter experienced a similar outage that was triggered because "an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter," The Verge says.
Once Musk took over Twitter in October and immediately fired thousands of employees and contractors, many users and industry insiders feared that the social media platform would collapse.
A notorious demand made by Musk was that they either agree to an "extremely hardcore" vision and work "long hours at high intensity" or leave the company, Engadget reports.
An estimated 1,200 employees decided not to sign the pledge and instead left Twitter with the assurance of receiving three months' severance compensation.
It is estimated that between the time Musk took over as CEO of Twitter and late January, 80% of the full-time staff left the company, leaving six critical systems without any engineers.
Related Article: Twitter Blue Head Jobless After Latest Layoffs
