Silence creeps over social media, as Twitter users from around the world can no longer access the microblogging website.
The problem seems to be serious enough, seeing how the outage is affecting both Twitter's mobile app and web interface.
The landing page of the service displays the standard message for such instances:
"Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing, we will fix it up and have things back to normal soon."
Most users who complained about the drop of the microblogging platform are from Europe. Down Detector, a site that reports when certain apps or pages have technical difficulties, shows that France, Germany and the United Kingdom were struck the hardest by Twitter's unresponsiveness.
Twitter's API status page is targeted at developers and showed earlier that problems were plaguing a consistent part of the site. The company posted a reassuring message on its status page, letting its users know that it is focusing on fixing the problem.
"Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution," says Twitter.
No sooner than Monday, a great number of Twitter users saw a service meltdown for about 10 minutes. Just like in today's outage, both the web platform and mobile app went down. Speculations can be made that the problem from Monday resurfaced today, cutting users' access to Jack Dorsey's platform.
When asked about the technical mishap, Twitter officials simply quoted the status page's message.
Europe was not the only place where Twitter went off the map. In Japan, users reported outages in spite of the fact that other Asian countries reported normal activity on the microblogging platform. From Scandinavia to South Africa to Spain, users complained that their favorite bigger-than-a-haiku-smaller-than-a-grocery-list messages could not be delivered.
Some Twitter users in Europe were still able to publish tweets, suggesting there was never a complete blackout in the region.
Twitter has so far been the place to go when Facebook outages occur, when Netflix goes down, or in other such cases when popular services go offline. Ironically, Twitter also seems to be the place to go when Twitter itself suffers from outages.
"I'm reading hundreds of tweets, on Twitter, saying Twitter is down," tweeted James Martin who goes by the handle @pundamentalism, according to Reuters. He makes a sarcastic comparison of the situation with the plot of the movie "Inception," where the talented Leonardo DiCaprio manages to convince people of things which only seem real.
We will make sure to bring you the latest news, so hold on. Twitter should be back in business soon enough.
