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Twitter for web returns after major outage on Wednesday

Twitter for web experienced serious service issues around the world for several hours on Wednesday evening, preventing users from viewing tweets and other content. The problem started at around 10 p.m. ET and took nearly three hours for the company to fix.  Twitter’s mobile app appeared to be unaffected.

Twitter Support acknowledged the issue at 10:52 p.m. ET, saying: “Profiles’ tweets may not be loading for some of you on web and we’re currently working on a fix. Thanks for sticking with us!”

It followed up with another message at 11:38 p.m. ET that said tweets “should now be visible on profiles, but other parts of Twitter for web may not be loading for you,” adding, “We’re continuing to work on getting things back to normal.”

Finally, about an hour later, it said: “Aaaand we’re back. Twitter for web should be working as expected. Sorry for the interruption!”

While it’s good news for the Twitter community that the service is now working properly again, the San Francisco-based company is yet to reveal what caused the problem.

Aaaand we’re back. Twitter for web should be working as expected. Sorry for the interruption!

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 1, 2021

The fault meant that anyone visiting a Twitter account’s webpage received the message, “Something went wrong. Try reloading,” but following the instruction simply produced the same message.

Frustratingly, folks seeking more information from Twitter’s support account via the web were greeted with the same response, with the rest of the page devoid of content. At this stage, users who were able to switch to their Twitter mobile app would probably have done so, as this appeared to be functioning as usual.

As you’d expect, disgruntled users quickly hit other online services to complain about the issue. One said, “Disappearing tweets? Anyone else?” while another suggested that some folks will “migrate to other social media platforms, just like they did before,” adding, “Twitter is like a dumpster, if it goes down, the trash spills all over the place.” Another quipped: “OK, who spilled coffee on Twitter’s server?”

Of course, most popular online services suffer issues from time to time, and this wasn’t the first time for Twitter to experience what appeared to be a major outage. Various technical issues have knocked it offline before, though the company is usually quick to respond to the situation and reassure users that it’s working on a fix.

Digital Trends has reached out to Twitter for information on Wednesday’s problem, and we will update this article when we hear back.

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Trevor Mogg
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