Twitter’s biggest failure since Elon Musk bought it on Monday night was caused by an internal change that resulted in images and links not working on the social media site.
This Monday afternoon’s service interruption caused millions of users to be unable to view or post new images. It also prevented them from clicking on any links.
After clicking on links, error messages were displayed that said “Your current API plan doesn’t include access to the endpoint” and gave the error code 467.
These failures occur just over a week following the dismissal of another 200 employees by Mr Musk. He bought the company in October 2013 for $44bn (PS37bn). Twitter now has 1,800 employees, a decrease of more than 7,000 since the Tesla billionaire chief executive took over.
The Wall Street Journal reported that staffing changes made by the mercurial billionaire following his purchase of the site for $44bn in October resulted in a 40% drop in December sales.
Twitter posted a statement to the site Monday saying: “We made an internal change which had some unintended consequences.” We are working on it now and will post an update once it is fixed.
However, Musk continued to tweet as normal during the partial loss of service, despite complaints from users that clicking links to other websites and newly-uploaded images lead to error messages.
Twitter seemed to be on its knees while its status page stated that “all systems operational”
According to technical sources, Twitter charged for access to its Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and this led to the loss of service.
APIs are technical data feeds that websites use to load tweets or other content from social media sites.
Twitter announced that it would end its decades-old policy of providing APIs for free to other companies in February.
Sources familiar in API technology said that Twitter software engineers created a billing system to allow API access, but forgot to exclude their own use.
Twitter was asked to comment.