Twitter said on Tuesday its social network was suffering outages in several parts of the world including Saudi Arabia and it was working to resolve the issues according to external monitoring sources. The issue began shortly after 0800 GMT, according to Down Detector.
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The statement added: “We reverted the change, which fixed the issue”.
“Apt song for the #TwitterDown crises we are facing at the moment”, Paul Lee Lotter, a Facebook user from South Africa, said in a post that included a link to the Led Zeppelin song “Communication Breakdown”.
In morning trading Tuesday, Twitter shares fell 35 cents to $17.59.
Some users managed to post to Twitter despite the outage – and #twitterdown was the top trending topic on the network.
Sporadic disruptions continued at 1420 GMT, six hours after they first began to spread.
Before that, the last reported outage came two months ago: November 19, a 30-minute span where “some users were experiencing issues accessing Twitter”. When other technology and media companies have faced similar problems in the past, people have often turned to Twitter to vent their frustrations – an outlet unavailable this time because the platform itself was the cause of the problem.
Even during the outage, services had been restored for some affected users, only to fail again.
Twitter has exploded in usage since its creation in 2006, with hundreds of millions of users. It was eclipsed by photo-sharing app Instagram, which is owned by Facebook Inc and surpassed 400 million users previous year.
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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.
