Continuing the summer of site outages, Twitter was down for about an hour, and the company says it is investigating a problem with its service. The company is not saying how widespread the outage was. The disruption appears to have affected both web-based and mobile users.
Outages like this have been annoyingly frequent in recent weeks. Major web services and sites have been crashing regularly since June. Google, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Reddit, AT&T and even Down Detector have all taken their own little summer vacations.
Outages were widespread in Twitter’s early years, so much so that a cartoon “fail whale” the company would put up 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 any more.
Twitter came back up after about an hour. On its status page, Twitter attributed the outage to “an internal configuration change” that it is currently fixing.
The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey took to his twitter account to react to the downtime on Twitter.
He tweeted saying…
We were down…and now slowly coming back up. Sorry! Grateful for our operations and engineering teams for getting us flying again.
