Twitter down: Social media platform faces global outage for hours

Twitter users expressed outage in many countries across the world as they reported problems accessing the service Thursday afternoon. Technical issues lasted for more than two hours.

The social media platform went down for several minutes and users found it difficult to tweet or retweet anything. People from the US, UK, Australia, and other countries faced the problem.

Those who tried to tweet something got an error message mentioning Twitter was “overcapacity”, or a note simple saying: “Oops, something went wrong.”

The “notifications” and “mentions” feeds were also unavailable.

According to DownDetector.com, reports of problems with Twitter began to spike just after 5:30 p.m. ET and soared to over 53,000 complaints by 5:58 p.m. Those began to taper off about 20 minutes later.

Twitter’s official status page said there was “no evidence this outage [was] caused by a security breach or hack. We’re currently investigating internal root causes.”

“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.”

A notice posted on Twitter’s status page at 5:56 p.m. ET said the company was “Investigating Irregularity with Twitter APIs.” At 8:11 p.m., the page was updated with a message that said, “We are continuing to monitor the issue, and things appear to have returned to normal.”