Twitter disruption silences swaths of Europe, parts of US

Many users of Twitter around the world reported yesterday and early today that they were unable to access the microblogging site.

Twitter Inc. says users are experiencing problems accessing its microblogging service. “We are aware of the issue and working towards a resolution”.

The site’s client apps, including Tweetdeck, were also prone to constant interruptions in service throughout the day.

The message greeting users trying to log on reads: “Something is technically wrong”. “We’re going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon”. Outages were reported across Europe and appeared to be concentrated in Britain, France and Germany, according to DownDetector.uk, a Twitter monitoring service.

Twitter was once notorious for its downtime, but much of that has disappeared in more recent years.

“The absence of Twitter morning rendered anecdotes useless; the child screaming on your train to work was no longer of interest by 11am”.

Earlier on, Twitter outages were very common that the over capacity of the company was labeled the nickname “the fail whale”.

Halfway through the morning, Twitter returned for many users, though with some features such as search and hashtags weren’t working.

According to the company’s blog, however, it had a brief 10 minute outage on Monday, as well as a roughly 20 minute disruption on Friday. It also reported 320 million monthly average users. Today, the social media site experienced an outage for at least an hour, covering a number of – but not all – regions.

For many in India, Twitter was offline after 1 pm.

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.