Update, 4:03 p.m. PT: Twitter came back online for some users. This sums up the outage nicely:
Most productive 90 minutes of our lives.
— Aaron Levie (@levie) October 15, 2020
Update, 7:15 p.m. PT: Just after 5 p.m. PT, Twitter said “the recent issue was caused by an inadvertent change we made to our internal systems. Twitter should be working for everyone within the next few hours.”
Twitter has been down for many of you and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone.
We had some trouble with our internal systems and don’t have any evidence of a security breach or hack.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) October 15, 2020
Original post: Twitter, where did you go?
The social media platform went down Thursday afternoon, with users unable to send tweets or load new tweets starting around 2:30 p.m. PT.
Downdetector shows reports of Twitter outages in the U.S., across Europe, in Japan, and other places.
“We know people are having trouble Tweeting and using Twitter. We’re working to fix this issue as quickly as possible,” a Twitter spokesperson said in an email to GeekWire.
Twitter added an update to its status page at 3:41 p.m. PT: “We have no evidence this outage is caused by a security breach or hack. We’re currently investigating internal root causes and will share more soon.”
Twitter’s API status page posted an update at 2:56 p.m. PT: “Investigating Irregularity with Twitter APIs. We are currently investigating this issue.” At 3:31 p.m. PT, it posted another update: “We are continuing to monitor as our teams investigate. More updates to come.”
GeekWire contributing editor Alan Boyle received this message after trying to send a tweet: “Twitter is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later.”
The outage comes just after Twitter limited the spread of controversial New York Post articles about presidential nominee Joe Biden on its platform. The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to issue a subpoena to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey next week in regard to the issue.
In July hackers gained access to the Twitter accounts of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and many others in a scheme traced to a Florida teenager who was later arrested.
We’ll update this story as we learn more.
