Twitter outage: Website, mobile apps down

During these outages, the services are not accessible from mobile or desktop and all historical tweets are unavailable.

In its early days, Twitter was known for its frequent service interruptions, popularizing the “fail whale” image that appeared when the site was down.

Elizabeth Dubois of the University of Ottawa says that while the disruption is “off-putting” for the average person, it can be a “substantial issue” for those who rely on Twitter for work, such as first responders and politicians.

Although the disruptions were among the most extensive the company has yet encountered, Twitter is not the only popular social network to encounter technical problems.

A spokesperson for Twitter Europe confirmed the outage, without detailing how widespread it was and how long it would last.

Millions of Twitter users were blocked from their feeds on Tuesday.

Twitter Inc shares were down nearly 7 percent at market close.

Users from Scandinavia to Saudi Arabia to South Africa reported outages.

Both Twitter’s web and mobile services began suffering outages concentrated in northern Europe around 3.20 a.m. ET, with smartphone users receiving the warning: “Tweets aren’t loading right now”.

Twitter was inaccessible for many users in the United Kingdom this morning for around two hours.

Many took to Facebook to report the outage with the hashtag #twitterdown.

Intermittent breakdowns later spread to the United States and Canada in the early part of their working day.

Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey did not confirm the plan, but said the company is “not going to be shy about building more utility and power into Twitter”.