PSA: ‘Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!’ and ‘Loading Tweets seems to be taking a while’ Twitter Error Fix

Holy moly, this set of “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!” Twitter error messages have been plaguing me for months and I finally found a fix, so I thought I’d write-up a quick PSA to help others with the same problem.

First, a couple of clarifications:

1. I was only experiencing the problem on FireFox. Initially on 10.x.x and also on version 12.0. Chrome worked fine, as did Internet Explorer.
2. The main symptom/error I was experiencing was the “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”

I did the usual things like Disabling all my Add-Ons and Clearing all my Twitter.com cookies, but neither of those worked.

My work around for months was to simply use Chrome, but it was bugging the hell out of me, so I tried some process of elimination this morning.

Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!

The main error I was seeing was “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”, when trying to visit a particular Twitter Status link like this:

http://twitter.com/#!/undershirtguy/status/201363357155065857 (example only)

so…I started back tracking through the URL until I got to the user’s Twitter account main URL:

http://twitter.com/#!/undershirtguy/ (example only)

Once I got to that level, I started seeing this error message:

“Loading Tweets seems to be taking a while”

So then I thought, I was most certainly getting the first “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!” message at the Twitter status/message level, because when I visited the user’s Twitter account page, I couldn’t see any of their Tweets.

See, if I can’t see any of their tweets, then logically speaking I shouldn’t be able to get to any of the individual messages, right?

I knew I could access these exact same Twitter pages on Chrome and IE.

Additionally, I was positive those pages did actually exist, and I knew that Twitter had been working fine in my FireFox before.

I suspected the error was a result of some saved/cached information that Firefox picked up along the way.

Figuring the best next step was to purge all my old cached FireFox information, so I went into FireFox Menu > History > Clear Recent History.. (or Ctrl+Shift+Delete) and up popped this dialog:

I kept all the options checked, and clicked the “Clear Now” button and waited a few minutes for FireFox to complete the process.

Voilà! That fixed both of the above problems.

I wish I could tell you the exact root cause of the issue, but I unfortunately was not patient enough to take a more granular level of diagnosis by going through each History category and clearing them separately.

If I experience the problem again on FireFox, that’s exactly what I’ll do to see if I can get closer to root cause.

Let me know if the above fixes your issue.