Explained: Why is Twitter facing regular outages, loading issues

Twitter outages are now more common than ever and every now and then, the microblogging platform goes down or stops loading for millions of users worldwide. Earlier this week, the social media platform once again went down for millions of users and it appears that the problem will likely continue for sometime as there was only one person handling the platform's application programming interface (API).

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. 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.

During the recent outage, when users clicked on links, they were greeted with a mysterious error message reporting 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 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.

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. (with inputs from IANS)