Twitter down: Major site outage caused by 'internal configuration change'

Social media site experiences major outages worldwide ahead of White House summit

Twitter went down on Thursday across major parts of the world including the US and the UK as users reported being unable to access the platform on web and mobile devices.

The site began experiencing major issues at 2:46pm EST, with problems being reported from users attempting to access Twitter through its website, iPhone or iPad app and via Android devices, according to DownDetector.com, a site that monitors outages on social media.

Facebook, Instagram and other popular social media platforms appeared to be working at the time Twitter went down on Thursday afternoon.

Reddit was experiencing outages on its website and app earlier in the day, but appeared to be back up and running for most users an hour before Twitter went down, according to DownDetector.

While the majority of problems being reported from Twitter were website issues (51 per cent), nearly 30 per cent were from iPhone and iPad app usage and another 18 per cent from Android users, the site reported.

Twitter acknowledged the platform was experiencing issues on its status page shortly after the first outages were reported online.

The social media company listed the status as “investigating” and noted a service disruption was causing the seemingly global issue.

“We are currently investigating issues people are having accessing Twitter,” the statement read. “We will keep you updated on what's happening.”

The site then began operating nearly an hour later at approximately 3:45pm EST.

The outages ironically occurred just before Donald Trump was expected to deliver remarks at the White House social media summit about his repeated claims that conservative voices are "suppressed" on sites like Twitter, despite evidence in fact showing they flourish on such platforms.

Twitter users joked that they were "all censored for the last hour" when the site eventually was back up and running.

The site said Thursday’s outage was caused by “an internal configuration change, which we're now fixing.”

“Some people may be able to access Twitter again and we're working to make sure Twitter is available to everyone as quickly as possible,” the company said in a follow up statement.