Twitter goes down on eve of Election Day

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twitter-birdTwitter went down late Sunday evening, a little more than 24 hours before Election Day in the United States.

The site stopped just before 10 p.m. PT on Sunday. I first noticed the outage on Tweetdeck; the website and mobile app don’t work for me, either. Down For Everyone Or Just Me notes that Twitter is down; people were posting about the outage on Facebook.

It’s not clear what is causing the problem. We’ve reached out to Twitter for more details and will update this post when we hear back. Update: Twitter was back online for me at 10:18 p.m.

Twitter had an outage last month, but was part of large group of sites like Amazon, Spotify, Reddit, and others that also suffered from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

Those sites were working Sunday evening, so it seems this is isolated to Twitter.

Given that Election Day is Tuesday, this week is perhaps the most crucial time in Twitter’s history, at least in terms of how many users will be engaged with the platform, and the impact the site could have.

Twitter has played an important role during this election season, particularly concerning the presidential candidates, both of whom are active on the site.

Twitter was front-and-center already this weekend, as Donald Trump reportedly had his Twitter access revoked by campaign staffers. President Barack Obama called Trump out on Sunday, noting that “if somebody can’t handle a Twitter account, they can’t handle the nuclear codes.”

Update, 10;25 p.m.:

Here’s some of the chatter on Twitter about the outage:

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