Is Twitter down? Users report 'API error' on links and images as Elon Musk admits platform is 'brittle'

Twitter was hit by a major outage leaving thousands of users unable to access the social media platform. Downdetector showed that issues began to hit the service from around 4.30pm today (6 March).

Many users who opened up Twitter were greeted with a cryptic error message. It appears that most of the issues have affected the Twitter website, rather than the app, although users on both have reported issues.

On the web browser version of the social media platform an “error” message displayed. Here’s all we know:

How long has Twitter been down?

Downdetector first started to receive reports of issues at around 4.30pm UK time on Monday 6 March.

The majority of problems reported to the website were from users trying to access Twitter website, with 79% of reports, compared to 13% on the app. The UK downdetector app also showed that 7% of users reported "server connection" issues.

Links seemed to be at the root of the outage. Clicking on a link brought up an error message that read: "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 same error message was displaying for some users when they try to access TweetDeck. Many users were only seeing a blank screen on that app.

Is Twitter back online?

Twitter appears to be back online, as of 6pm.

The social platform has been hit by several outages over recent months, following Elon Musk's takeover, but the technical issues also pre-date his purchase. An outage in July last year was described as “one of the longest outages for years”.

In 2016 it experienced a multi-hour outage lasting for almost two and a half hours.

Has Twitter said anything?

The social media app has not issued a statement about the issue. Twitter's own API status page has a message reading "all systems operational."

Twitter CEO Musk has responded to the outage. "This platform is so brittle (sigh)," he wrote, in a tweet that we can no longer access. "Will be fixed shortly."

The issues appear to stem from Twitter's own attempts to charge for API access, which it announced recently. One user quipped: "I guess this means Twitter is so desperate for cash that it started charging Twitter for API access to Twitter, but Twitter couldn't pay for it."

Was Twitter the only social media app down?

Downdetector is currently only showing issues with Twitter, while other social media platforms are not seeing spikes in reports of issues.