Social network Twitter crashed on Thursday night leaving millions of users worldwide unable to send tweets for about two hours.
Twitter users said they are unable to send tweets following the glitch which also caused homepage feeds to go blank. The unexplained outage began at about 10.30pm on Thursday, according to data from Downdetector.
One user wrote: “Is twitter broken or is it just me?”.
Twitter issued a statement saying it was working on the problem and did not believe the outage was due to any security breach.
“Twitter has been down for many of you and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone,” the statement said.
“We had some trouble with our internal systems and don’t have any evidence of a security breach or hack.”
The social media site seemed to be mainly restored by about 12.30 am on Friday, after periodically returning before failing again over the course of the two-hour absence.
Yesterday, Twitter temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign’s account after it posted a video about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son that it said violated its rules.
The video referred to a New York Post story from Wednesday that contained alleged details of Hunter Biden’s business dealings with a Ukrainian energy company and said the former vice president had met with an adviser of the company.
Twitter’s Chief Executive Jack Dorsey tweeted on Wednesday saying “our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable.”
After Twitter imposed the restrictions, the US Senate Judiciary Committee moved to subpoena Dorsey. Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham and Republican senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley said the committee will vote on sending the subpoena on Tuesday, Oct. 20 and plans to have Dorsey in front of the committee by Oct. 23.
Senator Hawley also called for sending a subpoena to Facebook.
“We’re going to finally have an accounting that is long overdue,” Graham said. “This to me crystallizes the problem better than anything I could think of.”
