Twitter users are apparently having some trouble accessing links posted on the social networking site. Users are complaining of receiving an error message when they click on links in tweets. Multiple users are reporting the outage on their Twitter accounts.
The error message reads: “Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing—we’re going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon.”
All Things D reports that the social networking site apparently fixed the outage temporarily by switching out its own link-shortening service with another service provided by bit.ly. The online publication reports that links are able to be accessed on Twitter via the bit.ly shortener. TechCrunch notes also that TweetBot and other third-party clients don’t appear to be affected by the outage. However, both TweetDeck and Twitter.com are both having the issues with the links.
Luckily the entire Twitter service isn’t down, but it is a bit of a problem for readers looking for news and also for news outlets pushing out updates via Twitter. The fact that Twitter was able to provide a temporary remedy for the problem almost immediately shows how far the network has come since the early days when site-wide outages were common. The social network can simply rely on bit.ly until it is able to fix its own link-shortening service. It’s always good to have a backup plan.
Several media outlets have reached out to Twitter to find out what’s wrong, but the social network has not yet responded. At the time of this writing, Twitter had also not posted any updates about what was happening on its official blog.
