Big Twitter Outage Leaves Users Disconnected

Twitter started the day on the wrong foot.

Many users noticed early on they were unable to access the service as the social network experienced a worldwide outage Tuesday morning. Anyone having flashbacks of the “fail whale”? The image above was once the familiar screen icon users would see when the site was inaccessible in its early days.

The worldwide outage started at 3:20 a.m. EST on Tuesday, January 19. Following the total outage, Twitter also experienced a number of access problems.

The problems were widespread affecting Web, mobile and even Twitter’s API (application programming interface). Users may have noticed the company’s error messages saying the network was both “overcapacity” and experiencing an “internal error.”

Two hours after the outage occurred, Twitter had worked out a lot of the kinks plaguing the site. Unfortunately, problems were still popping up sporadically for users. Some services were still unavailable making it so some users still couldn’t access Twitter.

Twitter’s developer-facing monitoring showed that 4 out of 5 of the company’s public APIs were experiencing “service disruption”.

Taking a look some hours later showed that most of these issues had been fixed, though one API was still having “performance issues.” This final API issue looks to have been fixed around five hours after the initial outages occurred.

Twitter has not yet revealed the cause of the problems. The company tweeted from its support account, simply acknowledging the problem and that it was working toward a solution.

 

“Failwhale” by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia

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