Coverage: Twitter goes dark after technical default

Tuesday is off to rough start for Twitter, after the social media site experienced technical difficulties that led to outages for many of 300 million users. Meanwhile, journalists everywhere are still breathing into paper bags to cope with the morning’s loss.

Robert Mclean of CNN Money had the day’s news:

Twitter said in a statement early Tuesday that its social platform was experiencing technical difficulties.

“Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution,” the company said in a statement.

The social media platform had been down since about 3:30 a.m. ET, but showed some signs of life by 4:55 a.m. ET. Service was still sporadic.

Some social media users took to Facebook (FB, Tech30) to express frustration about the outage.

“When Twitter is down, you can’t tweet that Twitter is down,” said Facebook user Lyndsay Pole in a post.

“it’s been a while since ‪#‎TwitterDown,” posted Facebook user Carolyn Gray in a post.

Chris Baraniuk of BBC News described how this shut down is the one thing Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey doesn’t need:

For some, the site appears to be intermittently accessible while the issue persists.

“I’ve had to talk to real people and that’s a little bit frightening,” joked social media consultant David Schneider.

“Genuinely, I didn’t know where to get my news from, I usually put a tweet out in the morning.”

Mr Schneider, who runs consultancy That Lot told the BBC that he did feel there was a genuine sense of community on Twitter which he missed.

“I just hope we’ll get through the trauma,” he joked.

‘Headache’ for Dorsey

The fault would probably seem like an “unwelcome headache” for Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey, according to consultants Frost & Sullivan.

There were also issues with Twitter’s application program interface (API), which allows websites and apps to connect to Twitter, principal analyst Sheridan Nye told the BBC.

“The loss of the micro-blogging site’s APIs multiplied the issue for all manner of developers, companies and organisations,” he said.

Ingrid Lunden of TechCrunch discussed the impact this outage could have on the rest of the social media giant’s day:

More seriously, technical issues are never good, but for a service that trades on providing a real-time stream of information, they hit at the very core of the product. Twitter may be used as a diversion for many, but as part of its wider business expansion, the company has also been attempting to place itself deeper into the center of how people interact and communicate for more critical situations in business and emergency situations. Latency issues like the ones Twitter experienced today cast a shadow on those ambitions, and makes it feel less reliable.

Screen Shot 2016-01-19 at 09.26.22Twitter was once notorious for its downtime, but much of that has disappeared in more recent years. The company, in working to wipe away that image, in 2013 symbolically changed its technical difficulty page from the infamous “fail whale” to a little robot mechanic.

It will be interesting too to see if today’s outage affects Twitter in the public markets. The company’s share price is currently under $18, near its 52-week low, as it edges towards its quarterly earnings report on February 10.

Mark Scott of The New York Times explained how Twitter isn’t the only social media site to experience an unexpected shutdown in recent weeks:

Twitter is not the only popular social-messaging service to encounter technical problems. Facebook, whose users now number more than 1.5 billion people worldwide, has also had a spate of shutdowns over the last 18 months, though often the problems have been corrected within hours.

But because Twitter is an important news source, as well as a sounding board, for many people, the shutdowns were a significant disruption in the global conversation. When other technology and media companies have faced similar problems in the past, people have often turned to the platform to vent their frustration — an outlet unavailable because Twitter itself was the cause of the problem.

“Thanks for noticing,” read a brief note that appeared on users’ Twitter pages when the website had problems loading. “We’re going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon.”