Twitter down: Social media network crashes leaving users without access
15 October 2020, 23:06 | Updated: 16 October 2020, 01:07
Twitter users were left without access to the app or website on Thursday night after the social media network crashed.
Thousands of people were reporting issues with the tech giant's Android and Apple application and the website, with news feeds failing to load and users unable to send tweets.
At one point Twitter's home page read: "Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing—we're going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon."
The DownDetector website said there had been more than 10,000 reports of problems shortly after 11pm on Thursday night.
Users reported error messages including "something went wrong" and "Tweet failed: There's something wrong. Please try again later."
Others were told that the service is "temporarily over capacity".
Later, 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."
Read more: Twitter brands Trump's 'immunity' tweet 'misleading and harmful'
Read more: Twitter accounts of leading world figures hacked in Bitcoin scam
DownDetector's site appeared to show outage hotspots in the UK and in the US, however users in Japan, Brazil and other countries also reported issues.
A message on Twitter's status page said the company was "investigating irregularity with Twitter APIs (application programming interface)" with "more updates to come".
When trying to post a tweet, a message saying, "Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot," was appearing for users.
One person jokingly commented: "Hasn't anyone tried pulling the plug then putting it back in again!"
Another said: "Anybody else having Twitter issues??? Tweets not loading, notifications are blank, etc...?"
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Cyber security expert explains what is behind the twitter hack
On Sunday, Twitter branded Donald Trump's tweet about being "immune" from coronavirus and unable to spread it as "misleading and potentially harmful".
The US President wrote on his account on Sunday afternoon that he had been given a "complete sign off" from White House doctors on Saturday.
Mr Trump claimed that his "sign off" meant that he was now immune from Covid-19 and "can't get" or transmit the virus to other people.
Later on Sunday, the tech giant flagged the tweet saying it violated the social media company's rules over spreading misinformation about coronavirus.
However, it did not remove the tweet, instead choosing to leave it up as it believes "it may be in the public’s interest" for the post to remain accessible.
In July, the Twitter accounts of leading world figures and companies - including Kanye West, Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Apple - were hacked by Bitcoin scammers.
Other names that were targeted in the cryptocurrency scam included Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Uber, and Benjamin Netanyahu.
The accounts, all of which have large Twitter followings, were simultaneously hacked with a message posted on each, encouraging users to send $1,000 (£794) to a Bitcoin address.
In return, users were promised that their money will be doubled and returned to them.
In response to the hack, Twitter temporarily prevented all verified accounts with blue ticks from uploading tweets as it carried out an investigation.
