Twitter Outage: Social Service Blames Errant ‘Internal Systems Change’ for Technical Problems
UPDATED: Twitter briefly suffered wide-scale technical problems Tuesday, as thousands of users reported problems accessing the service.
Users error reports for Twitter spiked on service-monitoring site Downdetector at about 2 p.m. ET Tuesday, with more than 15,000 complaints. By 2:07 p.m., that number had more than doubled.
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At 2:32 p.m. ET, Twitter’s support account acknowledged the issues. “Twitter may not be loading for some of you –– we’re working on a fix to get you back to your timelines ASAP,” it tweeted.
About 35 minutes later, Twitter said it had fixed the problems. “We made an internal systems change that didn’t go as planned and have rolled it back,” @TwitterSupport tweeted. “Twitter should now be loading as expected. Sorry about that!”
The technical problems resulted in some users being logged out of Twitter. The social network also was failing to load tweets and timelines. In some cases, attempting to load the main Twitter feed resulted in just the logo being displayed.
Most recently, Twitter experienced an outage of about an hour last month. It had 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.
Twitter’s latest technical problems come amid its legal fight with Elon Musk. On July 12, Twitter filed a lawsuit against Musk, seeking to force the world’s richest individual 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 had informed the company he was nixing the deal over Twitter’s alleged inability to prove the metric. Lawyers for Twitter argue that Musk is looking for an excuse to bow out of the agree-upon terms after his personal net worth fell with the drop-off in Tesla’s stock price.
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