Twitter crashes for millions, with just 1 engineer left in charge of key APIs

New Delhi: There was only one person managing the platform's application programming interface (API) when Twitter went down for millions of users, who reported a number of issues with the platform, including links not opening and images not loading.

Users were met with a mysterious error notice when they clicked on links, stating that, "your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint".

Images stopped loading as well and some users said that they could not access TweetDeck.

About 85 per cent of users had trouble with the web version of Twitter while 13 per cent had issues with the mobile platform

In a tweet, the company said that "some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now".

The company's support account tweeted, "We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences."

The change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API, according to Platformer.

Last month, Twitter announced it will no longer support free access to its API.

It ended the existence of third-party clients and drastically limited the ability of outside researchers to study the network.

The change had cascading consequences inside the company, bringing down much of Twitter's internal tools along with the public-facing APIs, reports The Verge.

Musk tweeted on Tuesday: "A small API change had massive ramifications".

"The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite," he posted.

There have been at least six high-profile Twitter outages this year, as Musk has fired thousands of employees, including those handling APIs and codes.

With inputs from IANS