Twitter suffers longest outage in years

Twitter suffered its longest global outage in years on Thursday, as the social network became unavailable for the best part of an hour around lunchtime in the UK.

Internet outage tracker Downdetector said Twitter went offline at 1255 BST, and stayed dark for about 45 minutes, with users in the UK, Europe and the US reporting issues.

According to the Guardian, the service has not experienced such a long outage since 2016, when it went down for more than two hours.

In contrast to other internet outages in recent years, the issue appeared to be with Twitter itself, rather than at one of the now-ubiquitous content distribution networks which tend to take many services offline at once when they run into difficulties.

“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,” Twitter said in a tweet on its own platform, long after the outage apparently ended.

The Nasdaq-traded social media firm has been embroiled in a battle of wills with outspoken Tesla chief Elon Musk in recent months, after its board accepted a $44bn takeover offer from the South African tech magnate.

After the offer was accepted, Musk accused Twitter of hiding the true scale of problematic ‘bots’ posting on its network, before announcing he was backing out of the deal earlier in July.

Twitter responded by filing suit in the Delaware Court of Chancery to enforce the agreement inked with Musk.

At 1018 EDT (1518 BST), shares in Twitter were down 1.22% at $36.30.

Reporting by Josh White at Sharecast.com.