Twitter offline for hours but the sky fails to fall in

Users across the world joke about the site’s problems

PARIS // Millions of Twitter users were blocked from using the social media website yesterday as it went down in several countries, suffering one of the worst outages in its 10-year history.

“Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution,” the US site said, without giving details of the cause of the outage.

Users in South Africa, Brazil, the Philippines, Nigeria and Uganda also reported problems accessing the site.

Users in affected countries were met with the message: “Something is technically wrong.”

Outages were reported across Europe and appeared to be concentrated in Britain, France and Germany, according to downdetector.uk, an independent Twitter monitoring service.

After a shutdown lasting about an hour yesterday morning, the site was back online in London and Paris. But users in both cities experienced intermittent service in the afternoon.

Users elsewhere – from Scandinavia to Spain to South Africa and Japan – also experienced problems.

Some Twitter users in Europe were still able to publish, suggesting there was never a complete blackout in the region. “I’m reading hundreds of tweets, on Twitter, saying Twitter is down. This is like In

ception,” said James Martin in London, who uses the handle pundamentalism. In the 2010 science fiction film, the protagonists are unable to distinguish between reality and a series of layered dreams.

Many took to Facebook to re- port the outage with the hashtag #twitterdown. The shutdown was also the butt of jokes from some social media channels, with British television channel E4 posting on its Facebook page: “Twitter is down. Worker productivity hits record levels. UK is out of recession!!!”

Rick Devens, an American radio host, said on Facebook: “We may never get back some of the clever thoughts I had during this tragic outage.”

Twitter has regularly suffered crashes since its launch in 2006, but generally of a shorter duration. Its social media rivals Facebook and Instagram have also had to deal with brief shutdowns.

During a site breakdown in July 2012, frustrated Twitter addicts were unable to post for two hours because of problems at its data centres.