Twitter’s Website Was Down With API Access Errors In The Longest Outage Of Elon Musk Era

Update 9;48 Twitter’s services appear to be restored

Twitter’s website was down for about an hour this morning. Attempting to access the home page of Twitter.com returned an error suggesting that “your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.” The Twitter app, however, appeared to be mostly functioning, though with some errors: all links failed, with the same error message.

The outage-tracking website downforeveryoneorjustme says the problems began before 9AM Pacific this morning.

John Koetsier

Twitter recently closed API access for multiple companies using it to send and read tweets. It’s unclear at this point if the current problem is related. Twitter also cut 10% of its workforce, possibly related to Esther Crawford (prominent product leader), who famously supported the many Elon Musk changes.

Twitter’s service has been surprisingly robust as the company has cut thousands of workers. That’s something that former GitHub CTO Jason Warner wasn’t surprised by.

“Twitter — the service — can suffer lots and lots and lots of issues and it will still be a useful/amusing service for many,” he said recently. “It is not the same as a mission critical product.”

The point: if a tweet fails to load in a user’s timeline, that user will likely never know, because another tweet fills that space. In addition, because most people use Twitter as part of their leisure or casual distraction, it’s not mission critical for most, and momentary issues are mostly solved by a refresh of a page or a restart of an app.

The outage however was larger and more extensive. It affected all aspects of the website, including advertising, corporate communications and advertising.

Twitter had an outage that lasted 45 minutes on July 14th, 2022. This outage lasts for about 15 minutes more than previous ones and is the longest in the Elon Musk Era.

It begs the question: Does Twitter still have the best people to manage the service and diagnose issues, then fix them? Twitter employed approximately 7,500 workers and had thousands of sub-contractors before Elon Musk. Now, the company is down to likely less than 2,000 employees, and it’s likely that a significant amount of critical operational knowledge has been tossed out the door.

Twitter’s motto is “Twitter: it’s what’s happening.”

However, this isn’t always the case at the moment.

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