Twitter Is Seriously Broken Today
Update 3/6/2023: Twitter's issues seem to be resolved, with CEO Elon Musk blaming the outages on a "small API change" that had "massive ramifications."
Since Elon Musk took over Twitter in late 2022, it seems as though the social media giant is incapable of staying out of the news cycle. From starting his tenure as CEO with a massive, public wave of layoffs to the intense shift in the work culture, Twitter under Elon Musk has been chaotic at best. In one instance, Musk sent out an email to all of his employees stating that they had 24 hours to accept his new "hardcore" demands or resign their positions entirely. Embarrassingly, this seems to have backfired drastically on Musk, with far fewer employees accepting the measures than expected.
In November 2022, Twitter engineers were quoted as fearful of outages caused by the massive employee exodus. Those predictions have come true, with the reports of issues skyrocketing towards the end of 2022, and complaints of broken features and outages becoming more commonplace in 2023, as well. On March 6, 2023, Twitter was hit with yet another strike to its reputation, as the effects of the brain drain become evident.
The issues we're seeing
If you happen to take a look at your timeline, you may notice that about half of it doesn't show up. As of writing, images and embeds are not functioning as normal, leading to error messages or just blank images.
In addition, the popular Twitter management app Tweetdeck is experiencing some downtime, showing the error "{"errors":[{"message":"Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information","code":467}]}." Clicking that link will redirect to the same page. Trying to open an incognito window on Google Chrome, or a private window through another browser will also bring up that same webpage.
According to a tweet from Twitter support: "Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. 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."