Elon Musk calls Twitter ‘BRITTLE’ after a more than one-hour outage hit users worldwide – site is back online after blocking outbound links

Elon Musk tweeted how Twitter was ‘so brittle’ when the platform experienced a more than one-hour outage that impacted users worldwide.

Users flocked to the social media site Monday to share error messages they had received when attempting to click outbound links. 

The issue appeared around 11:30 am ET, impacting the website and app, but was fixed by 12:50 am ET. 

One user, who is a computer science professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, believes the ‘error’ is because Twitter is charging itself for API access – ‘but Twitter couldn’t afford to pay.’

Issue reports began to appear on DownDectector, a website that monitors online outages, showing that the outage impacted the website and smartphone app.

Twitter’s API Status Page showed ‘All Systems Operational,’ which is far from what users are experiencing.

The social media platform was loading, but it took a few seconds for feeds to populate – and the same issue was impacting TweetDeck. 

It seems the issue was related to Twitter’s switch to a paid API, which the company announced in early February.

The announcement shared it will charge $100 per month for the basic tier of API and is geared toward developers who want to promote on the site.

The phrase ‘Twitter API’ began trending as the issue impacted users and now has more than 60,000 tweets and is still climbing. 

One user, who is a computer science professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, believes the ‘error’ is because Twitter is charging itself for API access

Elon Musk’s responded to the outage about one hour after it appeared

‘Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences,’ Twitter shared at 12:19 pm ET.

‘We’re working on this now and will share an update when it’s fixed.’