Twitter, apparently faced a global outage last night, affecting a wide range of activities on the platform, including newsfeed and the ability to tweet. However, the company has confirmed that the issue has been resolved now and the platform is up and running. This is the second blackout that has occurred on Twitter within a span of a month.
Twitter first notified the issue on its Status page on Oct 15, 21:56 UTC and said, “We are currently investigating this issue. More updates to come.”
At 00:11 UTC, it sent out an update saying, “We are continuing to monitor the issue, and things appear to have returned to normal. For streams, if your connection was maintained during this period, you should have received available data since this issue also affected the publishing side of Twitter. If you disconnected at all, a Replay will recover any Tweets during your disconnect, and the volume is likely to be very small.”
Twitter even tweeted from its support page at 23:16 UTC saying:
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
Downdetector, an outage reporter, shows the peak of outage from 4:42 IST to 6:12 IST with more than 1000 reports of outage across Twitter’s website and mobile application.
Twitter later reported on its Status page that it is investigating issues on Historical PowerTrack, Enterprise Search, Replay API, Compliance Firehose, Standard v1.1 sample and filtered streams. It also clarified that Enterprise streaming endpoints, Engagement API and Insight Tracker are back in a healthy state and running. Twitter Support tweeted:
Most of you should be back to Tweeting. The outage was caused by a system change initiated earlier then planned, affecting most of our servers. We’re working hard to bring Twitter back to normal and expect things to be fully resolved in 1-2 hours. We appreciate your patience.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) October 16, 2020
Finally, at 04:13 UTC, Twitter updated its status page saying all the issues have been resolved. The support page also tweeted saying, “And we’re all clear –– Twitter should be working as expected for everyone. Thanks for sticking with us.”
This is the second Twitter outage within a month after the platform faced a short blackout on September 30 with users in various parts of the world not being able to post or view a tweet.
