Image Source: NPR
According to Down Detector, tens of thousands of users experienced problems using Twitter on Thursday morning, which was when it experienced a brief big outage.
For almost an hour, users of Twitter were unable to use the social media platform on desktop or mobile devices due to one of the longest outages the service has ever had.
According to Down Detector, which analyzes internet outages, the number of reports of service disruptions appeared to start increasing around 8:00 a.m. ET. Reports started to drop sharply after 8:30 a.m. The service appeared to be back for many users around 9:00 a.m.
Unknown is what caused the outage. Twitter responded that it is “looking into the problem” when contacted for comment.
It had been years since there had been such a serious outage. Even though Twitter has not experienced a multi-hour outage since 2016, when it was down for two and a half hours, it used to be renowned for crashing under excessive load. Older users fondly recall the “fail whale” error message that flashed when the site was over capacity.
Since then, the site’s significance to international politics and culture has increased, and a protracted outage might even have had a significant impact on the Conservative party’s leadership contest, whose candidates have been trading jabs since Boris Johnson announced his resignation last week.
In contrast to previous significant recent outages, this one only affected Twitter and didn’t appear to disrupt any significant internet infrastructure layers. A large portion of the internet, including the Guardian, was unavailable for almost an hour last year due to a “content distribution network” Fastly outage. According to Fastly, it was caused by a single user changing their settings, which in turn caused a cascading problem that finally caused 85 percent of the websites that depend on its infrastructure to remain online to go offline.
Read Also: Twitter drags Elon Musk to court over failed takeover deal
An uncertain time for the company is when the outage occurs. Elon Musk made the decision to cancel his $44 billion purchase of Twitter on Friday after citing concerns about the deal’s viability for several weeks. In an effort to pressure Musk to proceed with the transaction, Twitter’s legal team sued him on Tuesday.
