Twitter experienced one of its longest and most severe outages in years on Thursday, leaving users worldwide unable to access the platform on both web and mobile for approximately 45 minutes. According to Downdetector.co.uk, the service went down at 12:55pm UK time, with reports of failures across the UK, US, and Europe.
The outage marks the most significant disruption since 2016, when Twitter was inaccessible for two and a half hours. In its early days, the platform was notorious for collapsing under heavy load, often displaying the iconic 'fail whale' error message. However, such prolonged outages have become rare in recent years.
Given Twitter's growing importance in global politics and culture, the disruption could have had material implications, including for the Conservative Party's leadership election, where candidates have been actively campaigning since Boris Johnson's resignation last week.
Unlike other major recent internet outages, such as the Fastly content distribution network failure last year that took down numerous sites including the Guardian, this incident was confined to Twitter itself. No broader internet infrastructure appeared to be affected.
Twitter declined to comment on the outage but directed users to a tweet stating: 'Some of you are having issues accessing Twitter and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone. Thanks for sticking with us.' Notably, the platform's own status dashboard incorrectly marked all services as 'operational' throughout the disruption.
