Twitter has experienced major problems with posting some images and links - the second time in a week it has suffered technical issues.

Clicking on links in posts resulted in users receiving an error message.

Twitter said some parts of the service were not "working as expected" and blamed an internal change that "had some unintended consequences".

It later said "things should now be working as normal. Thanks for sticking with us!"

As the problems emerged, chief executive Elon Musk tweeted "this platform is so brittle (sigh). Will be fixed shortly".

At one point Downdetector, which tracks technical problems across a number of websites, found that more than 5,000 people had reported issues.

Some news publishers warned users of issues in interacting with their twitter accounts.

Bloomberg tweeted a link to its report on problems with the message "if you can click this link, Twitter's fixed its bug".

Some third-party services that use a system called an API to exchange data with the platform also suffered issues.

Experts have noted that the platform seems to be experiencing more technical issues of late.

Following previous problems on 1 March that lasted two hours, Alp Toker, director of internet outage tracker NetBlocks, said Twitter's reliability issues seemed to have increased under Mr Musk's leadership.

"It started shortly before the Musk takeover itself," he said, but added: "The main spike has happened after the takeover, with four to five incidents in a month - which was comparable to what used to happen in a year."

Twitter has joined other tech giants in cutting significant numbers of staff, including a fresh round of cuts just seven days ago, although there is no evidence that this is the cause of the latest problems.

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