UPDATE: Twitter’s outage appears to be over, and users appear to be able to refresh their timelines and post new tweets. The original story is as follows.
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Twitter users were met with an unexpected surprise on Thursday afternoon, when the popular social media site unexpected stopped working. The outages began around 5:30PM ET, preventing users from refreshing their timeline or publishing new tweets. At the time of this writing, Twitter‘s outage has occurred for almost an hour, with the website Downdetector getting nearly 60,000 reports about the problems within that span of time. While it’s unclear exactly what caused the outage – and exactly when things will return back to normal – Twitter has already issued a statement on the whole affair. In a post on their official status page, Twitter confirmed that they are “investigating this issue”,.
Twitter cites the issue as being due to an “irregularity with Twitter APIs”, also known as Application Programming Interface, a type of software intermediary that allows applications to seamlessly communicate with one another.
This is just the latest kerfuffle to occur to the social media titan this year, after the accounts of multiple prominent celebrities and organizations were hacked in what appeared to be a cryptocurrency scheme. The hacked accounts included those of former Vice President Joe Biden, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, rapper Kanye West, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, and former President Barack Obama, all of which tweeted a similar message asking fans to send bitcoins to a similar address. The official accounts for Apple and Uber, as well as cryptocurrency-related Twitter accounts such as CoinDesk, Binance, Ripple, and Gemini, were also affected by the hack.
In the immediate aftermath of the event, Twitter briefly banned verified accounts from being able to send new tweets, in an attempt to investigate the security measures that led to the hack.
What do you think of Twitter experiencing a massive outage? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
