Twitter experiences brief service outage

Twitter experienced a brief service outage on Thursday, a spokesperson for the social media platform confirmed, but service has since been re-established for most users.

The platform, headquartered in San Francisco in the United States, went down around 5:30pm ET (21:30 GMT), US technology website The Verge first reported, with the last searchable tweet appearing shortly thereafter.

“We know people are having trouble tweeting and using Twitter. We’re working to fix this issue as quickly as possible,” a Twitter spokesperson told AFP news agency around 22:25 GMT.

The platform was back up less than an hour after that statement was made.

“We had some trouble with our internal systems and don’t have any evidence of a security breach or hack,” the company tweeted.

Twitter has been down for many of you and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone.

We had some trouble with our internal systems and don’t have any evidence of a security breach or hack.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) October 15, 2020

An outage tracking website said just over 58,000 Twitter users experienced the outage at its peak.

The service interruption came just before both US presidential candidates, President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden, are scheduled to hold rival town halls on US television networks in the final weeks of the 2020 election campaign.

Twitter also made headlines this week for restricting access to a story published in the New York Post about the alleged business dealings of Biden’s son.

That report has since been criticised for its accuracy.