A technical problem that affected access to Twitter for more than six hours has been resolved.
The microblogging site posted an update on its status page that read: “The intermittent issue affecting some users between 00:40 to 06:50 PST (Pacific Standard Time) has now been resolved. The issue was related to an internal code change. We reverted the change, which fixed the issue. Thank you for your patience.”
Users began reporting blackouts at about 8.30am GMT on Tuesday, with timelines then sporadically reappearing for some mobile users just before 11am. However, the site dropped back offline intermittently, with images and videos failing to load.
The issue was the longest-lasting in Twitter’s near 10-year history. Its apps, including Tweetdeck, were also hit by interruptions in service on Tuesday.
Regular blackouts were common in the early days of the site – an Apple live event caused it to crash under the weight of traffic in 2008. The last major drop in service occurred in 2014 when the site was down for about 45 minutes.
Warren Knight, a social media expert, said the blackout would not help Twitter’s image, but the firm should have no problem bouncing back.
“Any downtime for a technology brand is negative. But as quick as we complain, we quickly forget and go back to our daily habits,” he said. “It’s a short-term outage that only makes Twitter more human.”