This is what happens when you rely on link shorteners. You risk breaking the internet.

Link shorteners have the potential to dramatically reduce the robustness of the internet. A single failure point can break a lot of stuff. To my knowledge Twitter justifies their link shorteners with a security argument: they can easily prevent outbound clicks to suspicious sites. Although there is certainly value there, I'm skeptical. I bet it's more a matter of getting data on the kind of outbound traffic they're driving.

Try clicking any of the links from @nytimes or any other Twitter page...

Fixed... the issue seemed to last < 10 minutes