For nearly 45 minutes on Wednesday, X, Elon Musk’s social network formerly known as Twitter, experienced technical difficulties with links posted to the platform.
When URLs posted to X were clicked on during the outage, the site’s t.co redirecting service returned an error message that said, “This page is down.” “I scream,” read the error message in some browsers. You yell. We’re all yelling… for us to fix this page. We’ll stop making jokes and get things going as soon as possible.”
X employs its URL shortening service, t.co. According to the company’s website, “shortened links allow you to share long URLs in a post while maintaining the maximum number of characters for your message.”
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X’s link service collects data such as how many times a link has been clicked, which it describes as “an important quality signal” in determining the relevance and interest in a post.
Users, according to X, cannot opt out of link shortening.
Musk dislikes links posted to X because they cause people to leave the platform. Furthermore, he has stated that X’s content algorithm deprioritizes links.
“Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away,” he wrote on the 3rd of October. He added, “The best thing is to post content in long form on this platform.”
Technical issues at X/Twitter returned a strange error message to users who attempted to click on URLs for nearly an hour in March 2023. “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint, please see https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api for more information,” the error message went on to say.
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Twitter attributed the outage to “an internal change that had some unintended consequences.” According to the Verge, the error was caused by a blunder made by the service’s sole remaining site reliability engineer — the last one left at the company following Musk’s mass layoffs.
Among other recent issues at X/Twitter, the service unexpectedly logged out web users in May. Twitter abruptly blocked access to anyone who wasn’t signed in as a registered user in June, citing a “temporary emergency measure” after Musk claimed third-party companies were “scraping” data and overloading its systems.
