Twitter’s support account said the issues were part of “unintended consequences” to an “internal change,” with service restored shortly before 1 p.m. ET.
“Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences,” the account tweeted.
The account later added that things “should be working as normal” when the service was restored.
In response to a tweet about the outage, Twitter CEO Elon Musk — who took over the company in the fall after a $44 billion acquisition — tweeted, “This platform is so brittle (sigh). Will be fixed shortly.”
During the outage, when users clicked on links they were led to a page that said “Your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.”
Twitter’s own Tweetdeck service, which lets users view multiple timelines on one interface, was also impacted and had led users to the same message.
The outage came amid a backdrop of Twitter’s push to change its API, or Application Programming Interface, which lets third parties retrieve and analyze Twitter’s public data to create bots or other applications that connect to the platform.
Last month the company said it will stop supporting free access to the Twitter API and would provide a tier of access for a $100 monthly fee.
