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Links on Twitter restored after sitewide outage Monday

"This platform is so brittle (sigh)," Elon Musk wrote in response to a tweet joking about users' responses to Twitter's issues on Monday.

WASHINGTON — Links on Twitter appear to be coming back online after they stopped working across the site Monday, with several portions of the site itself also failing to load and instead giving error messages. It's unclear how widespread the problem was or how much of the platform was affected. 

"Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now," Twitter's official support account said in a post just after noon Eastern. "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."

For some users, attempts to reach the site's home page returned a lengthy error message on a white blank screen that mentioned: "Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint." 

For users who are able to access the site, including those on mobile devices using the Twitter app, clicking external links appeared to be broken completely. Preview photos for links failed to load, and clicking any external link led to the same error message seen by other users on the front page. 

Clicking on a user's handle in a tweet or a hashtag appears to work correctly. 

It's unclear what caused the error, but owner Elon Musk has floated possible plans to restrict or sell access to the site's API.

"This platform is so brittle (sigh)," Musk wrote in response to a tweet joking about users' responses to the issue. "Will be fixed shortly."

Musk's takeover of Twitter has not gone smoothly, with mass layoffs and an exodus from the company by development staff. In at least some instances, those leaving have reported entire teams responsible for critical infrastructure powering the site have left or have been fired.

According to some reporting, such as what one employee told the Washington Post, Twitter staffers are worried that one critical failure could lead to major problems because it could be in a system that nobody still employed by the company knows how to fix.

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