Twitter suffers unexplained outage

 

Users trying to access the social media platform Twitter on Friday evening saw the ominous message “Something went wrong.”

The company’s blog, where outage explanations are normally posted, was also offline.

The tracking website DownDetector showed more than 50,000 reports of the outage in just 15 minutes; shortly after 5 pm Pacific time, the timezone at Twitter’s San Francisco, California headquarters.

Attempts to access Twitter’s blog returned a text error message about “upstream connect error; or disconnect/reset before headers” due to “connection failure.” 

This can’t be good. #TwitterDownpic.twitter.com/K9zQs1tojh

— Jonathan Franks (@jonfranks) April 17, 2021

The service seemed to be back up for some users as of 5:27 pm Pacific.

Twitter Support tweeted that they’re “working on fixing a problem and you’ll be back on the timeline soon;” about half an hour later.

Tweets may not be loading for some of you. We’re working on fixing a problem and you’ll be back on the timeline soon.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) April 17, 2021

Twitter’s blog was back online, but the most recent post remained the April 14 announcement about the “responsible, responsive; and community-driven machine learning (ML) systems.”

Twitter’s nearly 200 million daily active users occasionally experience difficulties accessing the site, but global outages are rare.

The most notable recent crash was on October 15, 2020, just ahead of the competing TV town halls by US President Donald Trump and his challenger Joe Biden; and following the company’s decision to lock the account of the New York Post over its reporting of a scandal featuring Biden’s son.