TWITTER is down for thousands of users worldwide.
Social media fans are reporting problems with the website and app this evening.
1
Others have had issues logging into their accounts.
Users in the US, the UK and New Zealand are among those affected.
Many say tweets are not refreshing or they are being kicked out of their accounts and forced to log back in.
It is not clear what caused the crash or when all users will regain full service of the social media platform.
DownDetector, a website that monitors online outages, showed a spike in issue reports just after 5.30pm in the UK.
By 5.52pm here in the UK – 12.52pm Eastern Time – more than 1,800 UK users and 3,000 users in the US had reported problems.
One user joked: “Twitter was down and I had nowhere to complain about it.”
TWITTER CRASH
Social media users will be well aware of issues with their favourite sites in the past few weeks.
Those owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger – have experienced serious outages only recently.
The sites dropped out for a whopping seven hours at the beginning of last month, with three billion people left unable to reach Facebook alone.
At the same time, some users reported problems with sites including Google, Amazon, TikTok and Verizon, among other pages.
Daters were also left in the lurch, with problems on Tinder.
During the issues, Twitter saw traffic surge.
Its official account shared the message: “Hello literally everyone.”
WORLDWIDE COMPLAINTS
In just 25 minutes, Google search traffic for the site had risen by 50 per cent. By the time Twitter posted its comment, search traffic had doubled.
Within two hours, however, the huge spike in users would prove too much for Twitter to handle.
The site’s features malfunctioned and hundreds of users reported issues every minute.
By the end of the day, Twitter shares had fallen by 5.9 per cent – more than the 4.9 per cent drop suffered by Facebook.
Elsewhere, Twitter announced on Friday it will roll out a new search button on some accounts that allows users to more easily scan through a specific person’s past tweets.
The button, which can be found in the top right corner beside the three dots, appeared for a small number of users in October.
It will be rolled out more widely on the iOS Twitter app, XDA Developers reported.
It’s the latest in a long series of new features Twitter has added to its platform in the past few months, many of which are related to privacy.
In October it fully launched a new feature on its web version that lets users remove a follower without blocking them.
The option prevents a chosen user from seeing any of a person’s future posts or know they’ve been removed.
I found Facebook’s hidden list of people who have STALKED your profile
