Microblogging and social network – Twitter today suffered a major outage that has made it impossible for millions of users globally to access their timelines for at least about 40 minutes. This downtime reportedly took place at about 8:05 AM ET, as millions of users reported receiving error messages saying “this page is down.” These issues however affected the Twitter web and mobile platforms as well as the company’s TweetDeck app.
While these issues persisted, users were unable to log into the social platform or access tweets. Also at the time of the outage, the company’s Twitter page claimed: “all systems operational.” Downdetector, a website dedicated to monitoring such outages revealed it received thousands of reports of issues affecting Twitter. More than 28,000 reports of problems were logged on DownDetector, 57% of users experienced problems with the app, while 38% had trouble with the site. A further 6% reported an inability to post tweets.
The social media platform eventually came back at around 8:40 AM ET, with many users able to tweet and access the service again afterwards. The company issued a tweet at about 9:10 AM ET acknowledging the issue. According to the company’s tweet “we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone,” but it appears that most people are already connecting again. For now, it is unclear the cause of the downtime as Twitter is yet to give a clue.
After a series of issues faced by the social network in February, this is the first major outage ever since. Within the month of February, Twitter users reported an inability to access the service in parts of the US at least twice a week. The reason for Twitter’s downtime was reportedly due to a “technical bug that was preventing timelines from loading and Tweets from posting.”
Twitter’s latest service issues show up a few days after the social network resulted in filing a lawsuit against Elon Musk, after moving to exit a $44 billion acquisition deal. Musk’s move was reportedly based on claims Twitter has failed to satisfy requests for information on the bot and spam activity on the platform.
Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp are social media platforms that have witnessed such global outages. This major global outage took place in October 2021. However, the company stated that “the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change.” this and other factors were disclosed to the public afterwards.
Twitter has since been recognised globally as a platform for social-political engagements, as people regularly host forums through Twitter Space. Quite a number of these meetings would have had to be cancelled or rescheduled as a result of today’s outage.
Olagoke Ajibola is a creative writer and content producer with an eye for details and excellence. He has a demonstrated history of telling stories for TV, Film and Online. Aside from being fascinated by the power of imagination, his other interest are travel, sport, reading and meeting people.
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