Twitter down: Some users unable to access site, forced to look at dog instead
Twitter appears to have broken, for some of its users.
They were instead forced to look at picture of a dog sitting on a chair, and were told there is “nothing to see here”.
The site offered a link to click on, which suggested it might be a way of fixing the problem. But it appeared to simply take users back to the homepage – and showed them that same poodle again.
Twitter’s dog appeared to be a new addition: usually, the site shows a more standard error page. For a long time it was famous for another animal – the “fail whale” – that appeared when the site was hit by the common outages that affected its early years.
Amazon also shows users dogs on its error pages, when the shopping site is not working correctly.
The problem appears limited to Safari users who are trying to access the site on desktop.
Other browsers, and Safari on the iPhone, appeared to be working as normal. Alternative ways of accessing Twitter, such as Tweetdeck, also seemed to be working as expected.
Twitter’s API status page, which catalogues problems with the technologies that underpin the site, did not report any problems.
Outage tracking website Down Detector did however show a number of problems. While they were not at the scale of a widespread outage, it suggested that significant numbers of users were being hit by the strange bug.
