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It Wasn’t Your Connection – Twitter Goes Down for an Hour

By Laura Tucker
News Twitter Down Featured

Was there a time on Thursday where you picked up your phone with the intention of getting your Twitter fix and didn’t get anything but a blue screen and a message that something was wrong?

It wasn’t your connection. It wasn’t the fault of your phone, computer, or other device. It was the social media site itself. Twitter went down for nearly an hour on Thursday. The big disruption wasn’t even due to a hack: it was just an “internal configuration change.”

Twitter Goes Down

There’s no denying that you’re dealing with a social media addiction when you’re having a panic attack because Twitter went down for an hour. But if you were able to just hold tight and maybe busy yourself on Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat, you probably made it out unscathed.

Instead of being greeted by the Twitter feed, users in North America, Europe, and Asia were hit instead with a powder-blue window that read, “Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing — we’re going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon.”

While the service was still down, Twitter spokeswoman Lindsay McCallum told Digital Trends, “We are currently investigating issues people are having accessing Twitter, and we’ll keep you updated on what’s happening via our status page.”

Twitter users didn’t even have the option to fire off a quick tweet to address their frustrations. They had to make do elsewhere, though more than 100,000 eventually reported that the service was down.

News Twitter Down Note

“The outage was due to an internal configuration change, which we’re now fixing,” it said on the Twitter status page. “Some people may be able to access Twitter again, and we’re working to make sure Twitter is available to everyone as quickly as possible.”

The desktop version of Twitter was working again by 3:45 PM ET. While Tweetdeck was working as well, there were some users who were still experiencing difficulties.

By 5:10 PM ET, Twitterverse was happily tweeting again with most users back in business. They promised they were “working to get to 100 percent soon.”

This was marked by Twitter tweeting, “Miss us?”

A Life without Social Media

In a strange coincidence, other social media sites have gone down as well in the past week. Reddit was also down on Thursday for a few hours, and last week Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp weren’t working correctly for nearly twelve hours.

These outages just give us all a little flavor of what life was like before we had social media.

Did you notice Twitter was down on Thursday? Did it cause you any difficulty? Let us know in the comments how you dealt with it.

Image Credit: Digital Trends and Public domain

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Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

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