Social media networking giant Twitter has recently experienced a major outage at least 2.5 hours long and affecting at least three major European regions and parts of East Asia. Problems have been identified since 8.27GMT and are mainly focused on the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Switzerland, the UAE, Bangkok and several regions of the United States.
On Tuesday, the company said it was “working towards a resolution,” adding that the shutdowns had started around 3 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. The cause of the service disruptions is currently unknown.
Twitter administrators have noted in the company’s developer dashboard that three parts of its service are all seeing service disruption. These include "/1.1/friends/ids," "/1.1/search/tweets," and "/1.1/statuses/home_timeline." Meanwhile, stream.twitter.com was having “performance issues” but is now operating normally. User Streams also appears to be operating normally.
DownDetector.com - Twitter outage statistics, January 19, 2016
The company is not the only one to battle service outages. In January 2015, Facebook apologized after both its core Facebook service and its photo and video sharing service Instagram were taken down by hackers, prompting the hashtag “#facebookdown” and generating a cascade of Tweets, including an image of a t-shirt with the words “I survived #facebookdown.” Nevertheless, the hashtag "#facebookdown" generated a cascade of tweets, including an image of a T-shirt with the words "I survived #facebookdown." Companies such as Coca-Cola even took it as a viral marketing opportunity. More than 7,500 websites had services affected by that outage, according to Web tracking firm DynaTrace.
We don’t expect the same to happen with this Twitter incident and we wish the development team a safe, speedy and secure recovery as they recalibrate internal networks and position services back online.
On Wall Street, the company's share price is currently under $18, near its 52-week low, as company executives prepare to announce its FY2015 results in three weeks on February 10th.
