Yes, Twitter is down right now, and we don’t know when it’ll be back

By Joe Maring August 9, 2022

Twitter, the go-to social network for everything from cat pictures to political commentary, is down right now. Reports of the app being down first started around 2:09 p.m. ET, according to Down Detector.

We’ve confirmed the outage on our end as well. The Twitter apps for Android and iOS refuse to load on multiple phones here. The app opens, but trying to refresh the home page does nothing — instead just showing a spinning refresh symbol and nothing more.

A screenshot of Down Detector, showing Twitter outage reports on August 9, 2022. — Down Detector

At around 2:30 p.m. ET, Down Detector shows nearly 35,000 user reports of the Twitter outage. Of those reports, 46% of users are having trouble with the website, 45% of people are having problems with the mobile app, and 9% indicated a server connection error.

It’s currently unclear what the problem is, as is the ETA for when things will be back to normal. Until then, enjoy a (partially) Twitter-free afternoon!

Developing…

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Section Editor, Mobile

Joe Maring is the Section Editor for Digital Trends' Mobile team, leading the site's coverage for all things smartphones…

Social Media

Mastodon surpasses 1 million monthly active users as Twitter backlash worsens

Series of four mobile screenshots showing Mastodon's sign-up process.

Mastodon, an alternative to Twitter that's been getting a lot of attention lately, just surpassed 1 million monthly active users this week, all while Twitter struggles to deal with the backlash caused by recently announced changes to its platform.

On Monday, Eugen Rochko, founder and CEO of Mastodon, announced via a Mastodon post that the social media platform now has "1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today." This news comes after a particularly tumultuous week (and weekend) for Twitter after Elon Musk took over the popular microblogging platform just last month.

Social Media

Twitter is reportedly working on paid DMs to celebrities

The Twitter app on the Sony XPeria 5 II.

In what appears to be another effort to help Twitter generate revenue at the start of its Elon Musk era, the social media platform is reportedly working on paid Direct Messaging (DM), with a particular emphasis on those paid messages being sent to celebrities.

On Thursday, The New York Times published a report in which it mentioned that -- according to internal documents it saw and "two people with knowledge of the work" -- that Twitter was working on a paid DM feature that would allow users to send messages to celebrities for a fee. The fee structure for this feature apparently hasn't been officially finalized yet, but The Times did note that it could be "as little as a few dollars per direct message."

Social Media

Twitter Blue is losing Ad Free Articles and Musk’s latest tweets indicate further changes

Twitter Blue menu option on a white screen background which is on a black background.

Twitter has reportedly ended its ad-free articles perk that it offered to Twitter Blue subscribers.

On Tuesday, 9to5Mac reported that Twitter has terminated a Twitter Blue feature known as "Ad-Free Articles." The feature allowed Twitter Blue subscribers to read articles without ads from participating publishers. The cancellation of Ad-Free Articles was apparently announced via an email sent to those publishers.