Image: The Verge
As if publishers and users didn’t have enough reasons to reconsider their connections to the platform formerly known as Twitter, all outgoing links from X stopped working Wednesday afternoon. A problem with the URL redirect that captures activity before sending users on their way sent people to a simple error page saying, “This page is down. 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.”
After about an hour or so of that happening, the problem was fixed, although we haven’t seen any public acknowledgment of the issue from the @Support account, CEO Linda Yaccarino, or X owner / CTO Elon Musk.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because something similar happened in March, taking down links and images across timelines for around an hour. Twitter blamed that on an “internal change that had some unintended consequences” before Platformer reported the bug occurred because of a mistake by the site’s single remaining site reliability engineer, who was operating solo after Musk instituted massive layoffs.
Screenshot by Emma Roth / The Verge
This is the error message you’ll see if you try to click an outgoing link on X.
Update December 13th, 2:31PM ET: Noted links are working again.
