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Here’s why Twitter went down for an hour earlier on Thursday

Mathew Katz
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An error message showing that Twitter is down
Users saw this error message for nearly an hour while Twitter was down. Image used with permission by copyright holder

Twitter is finally back online after going down for users around the globe late Thursday morning. The hour-long disruption made Twitter the latest major social media network to go offline over the past month. You can blame your lack of tweets on an “internal configuration change,” Twitter said.

“The outage was due to an internal configuration change, which we’re now fixing,” the company wrote on its 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.”

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Twitter’s desktop site appeared to be working again around 12:45 p.m. PT. Tweetdeck was also working, though some users were still reporting residual issues. By 2:10 p.m. PT, Twitter said it was back up for most users.

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“We’re working to get to 100% soon,” Twitter wrote.

Twitter’s own Twitter account simply posted “Miss us?” once the site was back up.

miss us?

— Twitter (@Twitter) July 11, 2019

“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 spokeswoman Lindsay McCallum told Digital Trends earlier on Thursday, while the service was still down.

According to DownDetector.com, users started to report problems accessing Twitter’s website and mobile apps around 11:46 a.m. PT. More than 100,000 users have since reported the outage.

Users trying to access Twitter on desktop could only see an error page stating “Something is technically wrong” when you try to access it. TweetDeck appeared to be down as well.

The outage appeared to affect users in North America, Europe, and Asia, according to DownDetector.

This outage is the latest in a series of major service disruptions throughout the summer. Earlier on Thursday, Reddit went down for desktop users for a few hours. Facebook, along with Instagram and WhatsApp, stopped working properly for a period of nearly 12 hours last week. It’s unlikely that the outages are connected in any way.

Normally people would take to Twitter to complain when their social network of choice is down. Instead, some decided to post in the comments section of DownDetector’s Twitter status page, where users started posting snarky jokes — almost like they were back on Twitter.

Once Twitter was back online and working normally once again, users quickly began to joke about the outage.

I thought of so many good tweets in the last hour (1/56)

— Elise Foley (@elisefoley) July 11, 2019

With Twitter down I actually had to connect with my visiting family members and I will never forgive it.

— Benjamin Siemon (@BenjaminJS) July 11, 2019

We’ll be monitoring the outage in case Twitter goes back offline and will update this post with the latest on the disruption.

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Mathew Katz
Mathew Katz
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Mathew is a news editor at Digital Trends, specializing in covering all kinds of tech news — from video games to policy. He…
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