Twitter experienced one of the site’s longest outages for years, with the social network completely unavailable to users around the world on the web and mobile for nearly an hour.
According to Downdetector.co.uk, which tracks site interruptions, the service is not available at 12:55 UK time and was kept off for 45 minutes. The site appears to have failed globally, with reported outages in the UK, US and Europe.
The outage was the longest and most severe in recent years. While Twitter was known to collapse under a heavy load in its early days, with older users fondly remembering the “fail whale” error message that appeared when the service was out, no has had a multi-hour break since 2016, when it was. inaccessible for two and a half hours.
Since then, the place’s importance to global politics and culture has grown, and a lasting interruption could even have had a material effect on the Conservative Party’s leadership elections, where runners and runners have gone. negotiating since Boris Johnson announced his resignation last week. .
Unlike other recent major outages, the problem was limited to Twitter itself, and no major layer of Internet infrastructure appears to have been affected. Last year, a disruption to the Fastly “content distribution network” wiped out a large portion of the Internet, including the Guardian, for nearly an hour. This was triggered, Fastly said, by a single user updating their settings, causing a cascading error that eventually shut down 85% of sites that depend on their infrastructure to stay online.
Twitter declined to comment on the outage, but pointed to the Guardian in a tweet saying, “Some of you are having trouble accessing Twitter and we are working to make it work again for everyone. Thank you for continuing with us.” On the site’s status panel itself, the social network and all related services were erroneously marked as “operational” during the outage.