Twitter suffered one of the site’s longest outages in years, with the social network completely unavailable to users worldwide on web and mobile devices for nearly an hour.
According to Downdetector.co.uk, which tracks site outages, the service went down at 12:55pm UK time and remained down for 45 minutes. The site appears to have gone down globally, with outages reported in the UK, US and Europe.
The outage was the longest and most severe in years. Although Twitter was notorious for crashing under heavy load in its early days, with older users fondly recalling the “fail whale” error message that appeared when the service was overloaded, it hasn’t had an outage for several hours since 2016 when it was unavailable for two and a half hours.
Since then, the site’s importance to global politics and culture has grown, and a prolonged outage could even have a material effect on the Conservative Party leadership election, where runners and riders have traded points since Boris Johnson announced his resignation last week.
Unlike other major recent outages, the problem was limited to Twitter itself and did not appear to affect any major infrastructure layer of the Internet. Last year, an outage by “content distribution network” Fastly took down a wide swath of the internet, including the Guardian, for almost an hour. It was triggered, Fastly said, by one user who updated his settings, triggering a cascading error that eventually shut down 85 percent of the sites that relied on its infrastructure to stay online.
Twitter declined to comment on the outage, but pointed the Guardian to a tweet that read: “Some of you are having trouble accessing Twitter and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone. Thanks for sticking with us.” On the site’s own status dashboard, the social network and all related services were incorrectly marked as “working” during the outage.
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