It feels like every other week that the internet breaks – you’ve guessed it (from the headline), Twitter is down.
The social media giant is unavailable to loads of users – trying to access the web page brings up the message “Something went wrong. Try reloading.”, and the app won’t refresh with newer tweets.
Reports on downdetector.co.uk jumped up into the thousands within minutes of the outage – it’s worth pointing out that, while the reports also rose on downdetector.com (in the US), they didn’t rise by nearly as much.
It sounds like a limited issue, as lots of TechRadar team members haven’t had an issue. Saying that the sheer number of Downdetector reports shows that something is up.
Not only is the main Twitter feed down, but other Twitter sites are down too, like its Help site.
We just wanted to post a funny joke, and now we’ve discovered that Twitter isn’t working. We’re investigating.
Judging by reports from Downdetector and TechRadar’s US team, the outage is affecting far fewer people in the US than in the UK – it seems mainly a British problem. Well, we can add that to the list after Freddos costing more, Magnums getting smaller and the whole cost of living thing.
In the UK, DownDetector reports more than 4,000 reports in the last few minutes. That’s a huge number given how many we normally see – even for the major outages that affect multiple websites, we usually see one or two thousand reports.
This outage has come less than six weeks after the last Twitter outage.
That was a smaller one, as the main Twitter feed would load, but Tweets wouldn’t – so you could see them, but not click on them or interact with them.
Now, you can’t see anything – it’s radio silence.
Usually when there’s an internet outage, people turn to Twitter to look for answers. That’s… a little harder now.
We looked at Facebook, but Twitter itself hasn’t posted there for several months. Last time it did, it was a screenshot of a Tweet about cats. What is this, 2007?
Facebook is a bit more community-focused though, so it’s harder to see what people in the wider world are saying.