Twitter disruption silences swaths of US, Europe

After some downtime, Twitter (and affiliated third-party applications) appears to be returning to normal for some folks; I was able to launch TweetDeck around 6:15 a.m. ET.

Millions of Twitter users were blocked from their feeds overnight as the social networking site went down in several countries, suffering one of the worst outages in its 10-year history.

Meanwhile, the Twitter homepage displayed an error message mentioning the site was down due to technical problem. The social media outlet, which serves more than 300 million active users, was down four at least an hour across all of its platforms.

Almost half of the users (46 percent) complained about problems accessing Twitter via its Web site.

Even during the outage, services had been restored for some affected users, only to fail again later. The service was unavailable for hours for some while others found certain features such as search and hashtags would not work.

Twitter initially confirmed the outage with a tweet from its @support account.

At approximately 1745 GMT Twitter reported some users were still having trouble accessing the service. The hashtag #TwitterDown has been trending on both Twitter, when users could access it, and on the rival Facebook’s network. It said the issue that was reported yesterday had been resolved, and added it was “working towards a resolution” of problems reported earlier today.

Just couple of days ago the shares of Twitter fell to an all-time low of $18.68 on the Nasdaq.

This story originally appeared at ZDNet under the headline “Twitter outage strikes Europe”.