On Wednesday, Twitter experienced a service disruption that resulted in users being unable to access certain parts of the platform, specifically the "Following" and "For you" feed.
These feeds displayed an error message rather than the expected content.
The problem was widespread and affected users globally. The issue persisted for approximately two hours before being resolved by Twitter's engineering team.
DownDetector, a website that tracks service outages, reported issues with Twitter at 10:00 GMT, but the problem was resolved by 12:00.
In the UK alone, over 5,000 users reported problems to DownDetector within half an hour of the Twitter service outage.
The root cause of the outage is still unknown, and it is unclear if Twitter's recent 200 staff layoffs on Monday played any role in the incident. Further investigation is needed to identify the underlying cause of the outage and prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.
Even though some parts of Twitter, like the feeds, were not working, users could still send tweets as usual. However, no one could see or interact with those tweets. This caused top trending hashtags including "#TwitterDown" and "Welcome To Twitter".
Nevertheless, Twitter has had some temporary problems in the past few months. During a short outage in early February, some users were mistakenly told they had reached the daily limit for sending tweets.
"It started shortly before the Musk takeover itself. The main spike has happened after the takeover, with four to five incidents in a month - which was comparable to what used to happen in a year,” Alp Toker, director of internet outage tracker NetBlocks, said Twitter has started experiencing more issues under Mr. Musk's tenure as CEO.
Now we will learn why social media platforms generally suffer service disruptions and sudden outrage:
Social media networks can suffer shutdowns for a variety of reasons, including technical issues, cyber-attacks, policy violations, and government censorship. Technical issues such as server errors or bugs can cause social media networks to crash and become unavailable to users.
In some cases, these issues can be quickly resolved, and the platform can be restored. However, if the issue is more severe, it may take longer to fix, and the platform may be down for an extended period.
Cyber attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks can also cause social media networks to go down. These attacks overwhelm a network with traffic, causing it to become unavailable to users. Cyber attackers may launch DDoS attacks for various reasons, such as to disrupt a particular organization or to extort money.
