Twitter suffered its biggest malfunction since being bought by Elon Musk on Monday night after an internal change caused pictures and links on the social media site to stop working.
The loss of service, late on Monday afternoon, completely disabled posting or viewing of new images for millions of users, as well as preventing them from clicking on links.
Error messages displayed after clicking links said: “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint” and the error code 467.
The failures come just over a week after another 200 staff were laid off by Mr Musk, who bought the company for $44bn (£37bn) in October last year. It leaves Twitter with just 1,800 staff, down from more than 7,000 before the billionaire Tesla chief executive took charge.
Staffing changes made by the mercurial billionaire after he bought the site for $44bn last October triggered a 40pc drop in sales during December, the Wall Street Journal reported.
In a statement posted to the site on Monday, Twitter said: “ 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.”
Mr Musk, however, kept tweeting as normal during the partial service loss, despite users complaining that clicking on links to other websites or newly-uploaded images led straight to error messages.
At the same time as Twitter appeared to be falling to its knees, its own status page said “all systems operational”.
Informed technical sources speculated that the loss of service was linked to Twitter charging for access to its Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs.
APIs are feeds of technical data used by websites to load tweets and related content posted to the social media site.
Twitter announced in February that it was ending its years-long policy of making its APIs free for other companies to access.
Sources familiar with API technology suggested that Twitter software engineers built a billing system for API access but had forgotten to exclude the company’s own uses of it.
Twitter has been asked for comment.
