Earlier on Tuesday, Twitter (TWTR) went offline for some time. Many users reported that the website and smartphone apps of the microblogging platform were not responding. Some were getting patchy service. And all this happened when the US was in its prime morning news cycle.
With Twitter being one of the prime outlets for news in the current age of packet data consumption and social media, the disruption was soon a talking point in none another than rival platform Facebook (FB). The social media giant listed Twitter outage among its most popular trending topics of the day.
The morning time is usually when many users catch up on the previous night’s news. However, this outage was not limited to the US alone.
Users from all over the globe reported the outage, prompting Twitter to resolve it ASAP. As more and more users got back to tweeting after the outage, the microblogging platform’s support handle tweeted, “Some users may have experienced problems sending and viewing Tweets earlier today. This issue is now resolved.”
Some users may have experienced problems sending and viewing Tweets earlier today. This issue is now resolved.
— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) April 17, 2018
Back in the January of 2016, a six-hour Twitter outage prompted a social-media alarm, indicating how users have started relying on social media as a prime source of news and information.
While an outage is technical in nature, the social media industry has not exactly been in the good books of the market for the past couple of months. With celebrities eating away billions of dollars from Snap Inc’s market cap by posting tweets to the data privacy scandal that hit Facebook, investors are on the defensive. Such an outage by Twitter at this time is sure to bring many some very anxious moments. But now that the platform is back online, what effect it had is yet to be seen.