Twitter down: social media platform suffers global outage with users unable to post

Twitter has suffered multiple outages in many countries across the world, leaving millions of users unable to post to its platform.

The company confirmed that an “inadvertent change” made to its internal systems had caused the crashes throughout the US evening and Australian morning.

The entire social media site went down for a number of minutes and, although it was quickly brought back online, users were unable to tweet or retweet anything for more than an hour.

Those who tried to post were met with an error message saying Twitter was “overcapacity”, or a note simple saying: “Oops, something went wrong.”

The “notifications” and “mentions” feeds were also unavailable.

The site continued to malfunction periodically for a number of users. People in Australia, the UK and the US all reported problems.

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Twitter’s official status page said there was “no evidence this outage [was] caused by a security breach or hack. We’re currently investigating internal root causes.”

“The recent issue was caused by an inadvertent change we made to our internal systems. Twitter should be working for everyone within the next few hours.”

The outage came just a day after Twitter took the unprecedented step of limiting the spread of a controversial New York Post article critical of the US presidential candidate Joe Biden, sparking outrage among conservatives and a debate about how social media platforms should tackle misinformation in the lead-up to the US election.

Twitter blocked users from posting links to the story or photos from the unconfirmed report. People attempting to share the story on the platform were shown a notice saying: “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”