As if publishers and users didn't have enough reason to reconsider their connections to the platform formerly known as Twitter, all outbound links to X stopped working Wednesday afternoon. An issue with URL redirects that capture activity before sending users on their way sent people to a simple error page that said: “This page is down. Shout. You shout. We're all screaming… let's fix this page. We will stop making jokes and soon everything will start working.”
After about an hour of that happening, the issue 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, removing links and images across all timelines for about an hour. Twitter attributed this to an “internal change that had some unintended consequences” earlier. Platforms reported that the error occurred due to a mistake by the site's only remaining reliability engineer, who was operating alone after Musk instituted mass layoffs.
Update December 13 at 2:31 pm ET: Featured links are working again.
