SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter on Monday suffered a major outage with users worldwide reporting they could no longer read links to articles from outside websites.

“Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now,” the company’s tech support account said in a tweet, blaming the problem on “unintended consequences” from an update to the platform.

The breakdown, which appeared fixed in less than an hour, comes as the Elon Musk-owned social media giant was trying hard to stabilise after several rounds of layoffs saw more than two thirds of staff let go.

Experts say Twitter is running on a skeleton staff, leaving the platform vulnerable to outages as well as disinformation and harmful content given the fewer numbers to keep the site up and running.

During the outage, users trying to click into links were greeted with an error message saying “your API plan does not include access to this endpoint”.

An API, or Application Programming Interface, refers to Twitter software that is made available to outside developers to make their own adaptations of the platform.

Twitter said last month that it will discontinue allowing free access to outside developers as the company seeks new ways to raise revenue.

Since Musk took ownership of Twitter, the platform has been riven by chaos, with major advertisers fleeing, threatening the site’s main source of revenue.

Published in Dawn, March 7th, 2023