Twitter suffers major outage disabling external links

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

Musk tweeted that a small change with Twitter's data-access tool had caused the problem. "The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite," he said.

Downdetector, which tracks outages, reported more than 8,000 incidents of people reporting issues. The website collates status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform.

Twitter's support account tweeted later on Monday that the issue was resolved and "things should be working as normal."

Internet observatory NetBlocks said the issue had affected image and video content too, in Twitter's sixth major outage in 2023, compared with three in the same period last year.

Concerns about Twitter's stability have persisted since Musk took it over in October and laid off thousands of employees.

"Error messages supplied by Twitter's link sharing platform and internal API point to problems with the platform's microservices, which are having a knock-on effect on other aspects of the service," NetBlocks Director Alp Toker said.

"This suggests Twitter has not been effectively testing its updates before pushing them to the public," Toker told Reuters.

The layoffs and departures from Twitter have included many engineers responsible for responding to software bugs and other service issues, sources previously told Reuters.

Musk has also raced to cut costs at the company and in November ordered employees to find up to $1 billion in infrastructure cost cuts.