Twitter experienced technical issues on Thursday as their link forwarding server, t.co, suffered an outage. This caused links posted on Twitter or sent via direct messages to display error pages rather than directing users to the intended content.
The error page lightheartedly read,
“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.”
This isn’t the first instance of downtime for the t.co domain. A similar outage occurred back in 2013 before being quickly restored. However, this time the error message has been replaced with an ice cream from a robot.
The t.co service was introduced in 2010 which Twitter uses to wrap links posted on the platform. This is only the second time it has experienced noticeable technical problems in that period.
It is unclear what caused the latest outage or when functionality will return to normal. But Twitter engineers are likely working quickly to address the issue. We’ll keep you posted on the issue.
While annoying, the t.co problems seem temporary. In the meantime, direct links posted on Twitter will not work until the issues are resolved.