According to Downdetector.co.uk, which tracks website outages, the service was down at 12:55pm. UK time and was down for 45 minutes. The site appears to have failed globally, with outages in the UK, US and Europe. The outage was the longest and most severe in years. Although Twitter was notorious for crashing under heavy load in its early days, with older users fondly remembering the “fail whale” error message that appeared when the service was overloaded, it hasn’t had a multi-hour outage since 2016, when she was unavailable for two and a half hours. Since then, the site’s importance to global politics and culture has grown, and a long-term shutdown could have a material impact on the Conservative leadership election, where runners and riders have been trading barbs since Boris Johnson announced the his resignation last week. . Unlike other major recent outages, the problem was confined to Twitter itself, and no major level of Internet infrastructure appears to have been affected. Last year, an outage at “content distribution network” Fastly brought down a wide swath of the internet, including the Guardian, for nearly an hour. This was caused, Fastly said, by a single user who updated their settings, causing a cascading error that ultimately shut down 85% of the sites that rely on its infrastructure to stay online. Twitter declined to comment on the outage, but pointed the Guardian to a tweet that said: “Some of you are having trouble accessing Twitter and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone. Thanks for staying with us.” In the site’s status dashboard, the social network and all related services were incorrectly marked as “operational” throughout the outage.
