Twitter suffers global outage in UK, US, Japan and elsewhere - but says not a hack

Social media site Twitter says it has resolved a problem which prompted it to crash, causing problems for users across the world.

“We are continuing to monitor the issue, and things appear to have returned to normal,” the company said in a statement.

“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.”

The Down Detector website said there had been more than 13,000 reports of problems since shortly before 10.30pm on Thursday.

Users from the UK and across the world were sent error messages including “something went wrong” and “Tweet failed: There’s something wrong. Please try again later”.

Tweetdeck was also affected by the outage, with users unable to load their lists or create new searches.

According to Down Detector’s live outage map, major issues were reported in the UK, US, Japan, and Australia.

Twitter issued a statement saying it did not believe the outage was due to any security breach, and said it hoped its service would be back to normal “in a few hours”.

“Twitter has been down for many of you and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone,” the statement said.

“We had some trouble with our internal systems and don’t have any evidence of a security breach or hack.”

Twitter later added: “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 message on Twitter’s status page said the company was “investigating irregularity with Twitter APIs (application programming interface)” with “more updates to come”.

The company has been contacted for more information.

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Author: Dominic Ponsford

Dominic Ponsford is the editor of Press Gazette View all posts by Dominic Ponsford