Social media platform Twitter experienced a brief outage this afternoon with outage reports to Downdetector spiking to more than 80,000 starting around 4:45 p.m. PDT. Service appears to have continued beginning around 5:20 p.m.

Still, the short break didn't go by unnoticed with users returning to the platform asking questions.

Other parts of the Twitter.com domain may have been affected during this time. Attempting to access the company blog as the outage went on returned this error:

upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: connection failure

Ironically, we had just published this post when the site came back online.

Things change that fast, y'all.

The brief outage may not have affected everyone universally. A tweet from the @TwitterSupport account implies the outage may not have hit everyone, and may only have impacted the ability to view tweets, not create them.

The Twitter API Status dashboard also indicates no issues today. Whatever the precise cause or the number of folks affected, we'll probably hear more by Monday.