For the second time in a week, social media giant Twitter has been hit by a major bug causing outages and error messages. The bug may trap users on the site making it impossible to leave to other websites. And keep them from seeing images.

Users posting some images and links continue to suffer technical issues. And clicking on links in posts has resulted in some users receiving an error message.

The technical issues followed another round of layoffs that the platform’s owner Elon Musk is directing to make the company profitable.

Outages and error messages ongoing

During the current outage, the site remained up, but users who clicked on links were instead shown a long error message indicating that there is a problem with Twitter’s API, the system that is used to communicate with other services.

This means that links shared on the site cannot be followed at all, and links also show up as blank blocks of color. 

TweetDeck, the company’s more specialized service for following tweets, also appeared to be broken as a result of the same problems. Users saw the app go entirely blank at the same time the links broke. 

It is possible that Twitter engineers unintentionally created the disruptions while making major changes to its systems.

Twitter has been making changes to its API in recent weeks in an attempt to generate more revenue. The company announced recently that it would largely cut its free API support, effectively killing off third-party services that rely on it, such as third-party Twitter clients. 

The company had promised that a new service would be “coming very soon” in a tweet posted on 26 February from its account focused on developers. It may be that the latest problems are the result of the long-awaited introduction of that new API.

Twitter support posted about the problem. 

As the issues continued, new owner, Elon Musk tweeted "this platform is so brittle (sigh). Will be fixed shortly".

Twitter may have brought that API access to an end without announcing the change, and in so doing, breaking all of its own linked systems that rely on access to that API. 

Clicking on links on Twitter does not immediately take users to the URL that they have clicked on. Instead, they are first routed through Twitter’s servers, which then take them to the link, so an outage at Twitter can break all outbound traffic from the site.