Many people around the world lost access to Twitter this morning shortly after 8 am EDT. While the outage didn't affect everyone (apparently this very article went live on Twitter during the outage), it did hit a large number of users. The network wasn't accessible for many for about an hour until about 8:50 am EDT, but it should be back up for everyone now.

Time shown in CEST in this graphic

Looking at Downdetector.com, which aggregates user reports on services that are currently down, there was a big spike in down reports that has only been going up since about at about 8 am EDT (time in the graphic above shown in CEST). Currently, it is still unknown what caused the issue, but it's something many people experienced.

Twitter's own API status currently shows a few errors and degraded performance, with the company saying that it has been investigating a "possible" outage since 8:06 am EDT.

Looking back, this may have been the longest outage since 2016, when it was down for a longer period of time, too. The most recent incident like this at Twitter happened in April 2021, when the network was down for a much shorter period of time for some people.

From what we can gather right now, huge parts of Europe and the United States were affected. However, one Android Police writer in India was still able to access Twitter during the outage, so it might have been a regional issue only affecting certain parts of the world.

It also seems like only the social network itself was down. It was still possible to access auxiliary sites like help.twitter.com during the outage.

When you visited Twitter during the down time, you may have noticed that the service was not fully down. For some people, it still showed parts of the interface, but none of the content. Both the newsfeed and the sidebar with trends said "Something went wrong. Try reloading." Hitting those reload buttons didn't seem to do anything, though. It also looks like the Twitter website didn't know that you were logged in anymore, as it asked many people to log in again.

In the mobile Twitter app, the situation was slightly different. Content already downloaded and cached on your device was still accessible for some, but the app refused to load new content or replies.

At the moment, Twitter doesn't seem to be able to catch a break. The issues hit the company just after it had its falling out with prospective buyer Elon Musk, who is currently trying to back out of the purchase deal he made with the social network. Twitter wants him to honor the signed deal to buy the platform, though, and has filed a lawsuit to make it happen.

UPDATE: 2022/07/14 08:56 EST BY MANUEL VONAU

Twitter is back

After a good hour of no Twitter for many people around the world from about 8 am to 8:50 am EDT, the social network appears to be back up for everyone. We've updated the article to reflect that.

A previous version also stated that the service was likely fully down for everyone. We have since confirmed that while it was a big outage, the network was still available for quite a few users.

Thanks: Kieron