FOR ABOUT AN HOUR, THE WORLD WENT HASHTAGLESS

SAN FRANCISCO» “Miss us?” Twitter tweeted from its official account as the Great Twitter Outage wound down.

We did, apparently.

For nearly an hour Thursday, the service we use to keep up with everything and nothing appeared inaccessible for people around the world, regardless of celebrity status or follower count. We reloaded and reloaded. Some turned to Instagram, Facebook and even LinkedIn to express outrage over the outage.

But it was just not the same. Then, shortly before noon, it was back for many of us. Twitter posted an explanation on its status page blaming an “internal configuration change” that it was fixing.

The model Chrissy Teigen phrased the collective sigh in all caps, tweeting “OH THANK GOD.” Earlier, she turned to Instagram to post what looked very much like a tweet: “TWITTER IS DOWN I DON’T KNOW WHERE ELSE TO SAY THIS AHHHHHH.” How serious she was is in the eyes of the beholder.

As users recalled their experiences, #TwitterDown was trending. Some were too young to remember a time when such an outage was a common occurrence.

Outages were so widespread in Twitter’s early years that a cartoon “fail whale” the company displayed during outages came to symbolize Twitter almost as much as its little blue bird icon. The whale was retired in 2013, largely because Twitter didn’t want to be associated with what it represented anymore. After all, outages had become far less common.