X/Twitter Link System Suffers Brief Outage

UPDATED: X, the Elon Musk-owned social network formerly known as Twitter, experienced technical difficulties with links posted to the platform Wednesday for nearly 45 minutes.

During the outage, when URLs posted to X were clicked on, the site’s t.co redirecting service returned an error message that said, “This page is down.” On some browsers, the error message read, “I scream. You scream. We all scream… for us to fix this page. We’ll stop making jokes and get things up and running soon.”

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X uses its own link-shortening service, t.co. The company explains on its website that “Shortened links allow you to share long URLs in a post while maintaining the maximum number of characters for your message.” X’s link service measures information such as how many times a link has been clicked, which it notes is “an important quality signal” in determining relevancy and interest in a post.

According to X, users cannot opt out of link shortening.

Musk isn’t a fan of links posted to X, because they drive people off the platform. In addition, he has said 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 posted on Oct. 3, adding, “Best thing is to post content in long form on this platform.”

In March 2023, technical problems at X/Twitter returned a weird error message to users who tried to click on URLs for nearly an hour. “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 read. Twitter blamed the outage on “an internal change that had some unintended consequences.” According to a report by the Verge, the error occurred because of a mistake made by the service’s sole remaining site reliability engineer — the last one left at the company after Musk’s mass layoffs.

Among other recent problems at X/Twitter, in May the service was spontaneously logging out web users. In June, Twitter without notice suddenly blocked access to anyone who wasn’t signed in as a registered user; Musk said that was a “temporary emergency measure” after he claimed third-party companies were “scraping” data and overloading its systems.

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