TweetDeck.com is down, but TweetDeck still works

I ran into a bit of a surprise when I tried to log into TweetDeck today: it didn’t work.

When I started typing the word “tweetdeck” into my URL bar, my browser suggested the rest of the URL, tweetdeck.com, like I’m used to. But after I hit the Enter key, my browser unexpectedly took a few seconds to attempt to load TweetDeck and then showed me this error message on a largely blank page:

upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: connection failure

I ran into the same error in two different Chrome profiles and then began to panic. Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, I haven’t been tweeting as much, but I still rely on my many TweetDeck columns and alerts as important newsgathering tools for my job.

To my relief, however, a colleague told me that TweetDeck was working for them, and we figured out why.

It turns out that navigating to tweetdeck.com consistently throws the error I was seeing, but entering tweetdeck.twitter.com loads TweetDeck just fine. This seems to indicate that the issue with the shorter URL is some sort of redirect problem on Twitter’s end.

We weren’t the only ones observing the issue. Freelance writer Bob Bardsley tweeted the same solution on January 5th, and many people have thanked him in the replies.

As far as I can tell, Twitter hasn’t yet addressed the issue in an official capacity. It hasn’t mentioned it on its TweetDeck Twitter account (which, as of this writing, hasn’t tweeted since August) or the Twitter Support account (which most recently tweeted on December 22nd, 2022). The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, though it has dissolved its press office.

Despite the many layoffs, including more this week, Twitter has generally worked as normal, though there have been a few bouts of glitchiness. And outside of this weird redirect issue, TweetDeck has continued to work fine for me. Fingers crossed that somebody at Twitter can fix what’s going on, but in the meantime, I’ll be entering the full TweetDeck URL into my browser to access my sweet, sweet columns.