How a single engineer brought down Twitter

Twitter’s website is breaking in novel new ways — and while the company managed to recover from its latest outage within a couple of hours, the story behind how it broke suggests there are likely to be similar problems in the near future.

On Monday morning, Twitter users logged on to find a thicket of connected issues. Clicking on links would no longer open them; instead, users would see a mysterious error message reporting that “your current API plan does not include access to this endpoint.” Images stopped loading as well. Other users reported that they could not access TweetDeck, the Twitter-owned client for professional users.

Chaos took over the timeline, as users tweeted vociferously about the outage — often illustrating their...

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