Twitter resolves technical issue after six hours
Twitter has confirmed a technical problem that affected access to the site for more than six hours has now been resolved.
The social media site posted an update to its status page, which read: “The intermittent issue affecting some users between 00:40 to 06:50 PST (Pacific Standard Time) has now been resolved.
“The issue was related to an internal code change. We reverted the change, which fixed the issue. Thank you for your patience.”
A tweet from the site’s support account also confirmed the fix.
Users of the social media platform began reporting blackouts at around 8.30am on Tuesday, with Twitter timelines then sporadically reappearing for some users on mobile apps just before 11am.
However, the site regularly dropped back offline, with images and videos failing to load at all for many during this time.
The issue was the longest-lasting in the micro-blogging site’s almost 10-year history.
The site’s client apps, including Tweetdeck, were also prone to constant interruptions in service throughout the day.
Though short, regular blackouts were common in the early days of the site – an Apple live event caused it to crash under the weight of traffic in 2008 - extended outages have become less frequent in recent years, with the last major drop in service occurring in 2014 when the site was down for around 45 minutes.
Social media expert Warren Knight said the blackout would not help Twitter’s struggling public image, but that the firm should have no problem bouncing back.
“Any downtime for a technology brand is negative, and as quick we complain we quickly forget and go back to our daily habits,” he said.
“It’s a short-term outage that only makes Twitter more human.”
More than half of those who reported an issue did so concerning the website, but users of the iOS and Android mobile apps also reported problems.
