If you are a regular Twitter user, you might have noticed that the application was (or still is) inaccessible for a little while recently. Well, you would not have been alone. Many people all around the world faced the same issue. The Twitter Support account addressed the issue in a tweet:
Twitter has been down for many of you and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone.
We had some trouble with our internal systems and don’t have any evidence of a security breach or hack.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) October 15, 2020
According to DownDetector, an outage tracking website, Twitter was down from around 2:10 am PST today till around 5 in the morning; reports of inaccessibility are still coming in but have significantly lessened since when the outage first started.
An update was given, after the situation escalated, on a Twitter developer forum. Jessica Garson, a Twitter official said, “Thanks for reaching out, we are currently aware of this situation due to an outage and we’re working on resolving this shortly. A few endpoints seem to be coming back already.”
A statement given by a spokesperson said, “We know people are having trouble Tweeting and using Twitter. We’re working to fix this issue as quickly as possible. We’ll share more when we have it and Tweet from @TwitterSupport when we can – stay tuned.”
The service started to pick up again after an hour or so had passed and some users reported the site as functional once more. The Tweet by the support account said that no signs of hacking or any other malicious activity were apparent and that trouble with some internal systems was the reason the website stopped working.
The recent issue was caused by an inadvertent change we made to our internal systems. Twitter should be working for everyone within the next few hours. https://t.co/3YFaIsH3TH
— Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) October 16, 2020
Once the service was back up, many reported that the saved bookmarks featured was still inaccessible. Twitter has since worked at resolving this issue and reports of the feature being operable again have been surfacing ever since.
Nearly seven hours since the outage was first reported, Twitter’s Status page has now marked the issue as resolved. “Twitter should be working as expected for everyone. We appreciate you sticking with us.”
Twitter users are quite familiar with such outages. Many have become familiar with Twitter’s fail whale icon – an image that appears on the website when it is over capacity or cannot be reached. Twitter has also seen many hackings; the most recent one being the Bitcoin hack, back in July.
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