Twitter Down: Social Network Recovers After Hourlong Outage

Todd Spangler
·2 min read
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UPDATED: Twitter’s website and apps were down Thursday morning in an apparent widespread outage, according to user reports across the U.S. The social network appeared to resolve the problems after about an hour.

According to monitoring site Downdetector, user reports of problems at Twitter began to spike just after 8 a.m. ET., with more than 54,000 issues reported as of 8:19 a.m. In the U.S., problem reports were highest in L.A. and New York, according to Downdetector.

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As of about 9 a.m. ET, Twitter appeared to be operating normally again. The Twitter Support account tweeted 10 minutes later, “Some of you are having issues accessing Twitter and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone. Thanks for sticking with us.”

While service had largely appeared to return by then, Twitter Support tweeted at 12:37 p.m. ET, “And we’re back! We had some trouble with our internal systems that impacted many of you globally. Twitter should be up and running as expected — sorry for the interruption.”

During the outage, Twitter’s app and site were displaying a message saying, “Something went wrong. Try reloading.” Twitter users also were being logging users out of their accounts, and when they tried to log back in, were shown an error message that said, “Oops, something went wrong. Please try again later.”

Twitter’s API status page indicated that all systems were operating normally Thursday.

Most recently, Twitter experienced similar problems on Feb. 17, coming less than a week after another an hourlong outage the company ascribed to a “technical bug” that was preventing timelines from loading and tweets from posting.

In the past 12 months, Twitter experienced 54 instances of significant user-reported problems as recorded by Downdetector. By comparison, over the same time period, Instagram has had 81, YouTube has had 65 and Google has had 58.

Twitter’s outage Thursday comes as it’s in the midst of a legal fight with Elon Musk. On July 12, Twitter filed a lawsuit against Musk, seeking to force the world’s richest person to consummate his $44 billion acquisition deal for the company. Musk has questioned Twitter’s longstanding claim that spam and fake accounts are less than 5% of total active users and said he was nixing the deal over Twitter’s alleged inability to prove the metric. Twitter, in its lawsuit, says the spam/bot issue is a red herring and that Musk is backing out because the stock market decline has made the deal more expensive for him personally.

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