Twitter experiences outages following death of Queen Elizabeth II

Thousands of users reported issues after Buckingham Palace announced monarch’s death

Twitter experienced reported outages as users logged onto the social media platform following the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

The Internet Observatory, a group that tracks online disruption, censorship, and cyber-attacks, stated that “international outages” took place as news of the Queen’s death at Balmoral broke.

Downdetector, a website that allows people to log website and online outages, showed that more than 2,600 users reported that Twitter was down for them.

The website stated that thousands of complaints were recorded at 1:36pm. ET, around six minutes after Buckingham Palace announced the Queen’s death in a short statement.

Users complained that they received “Tweets aren’t loading right now. Try again,” or “Cannot retrieve Tweets at this time” messages on the platform.

The Independent has reached out to Twitter for comment.

The Internet Observatory’s NetBlocks Twitter account said that the disruption was “not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering .”

The outages were reported in the US, UK, Canada, and Japan, but the company’s Twitter Support account has not yet tweeted about it.

“Why Twitter is breaking down? Is this because of the Queen?” wrote one user.

And another user added: “Of course Twitter is down on the most important day of the year.”