Twitter Down, Thousands Reporting Outages

Some users experienced issues with Twitter on Saturday, with full-on outages reported in some areas. As the holiday weekend kicked off, Twitter began slowing down, displaying an error message saying the site was "over capacity." At this point, users are getting used to widespread social media outages during high-traffic times such as Labor Day weekend. However, on Saturday the issues hit Twitter rather than Facebook or Instagram, which have become the usual culprits in the last few months.

According to Down Detector, reports of issues with Twitter began to spike around mid-morning on Tuesday. At the time of this writing, there are over 2,300 unresolved reports for the site.

The majority of the issues with Twitter seemed to be concentrated on its desktop site. Those accessing the social media platform from a computer had problems, making up about 44% of the reports. However, another 30% of the problems came from iOS users on iPhones or iPads, and 24% came from Android users.

The issues started just after 11 a.m. on Saturday, just as huge portions of the U.S. started their holiday weekend. In keeping with this, the live outage map showed many concentrations of Twitter issues in populous parts of the country, including the north-east, southern California and the Chicago area.

Users around the world registered problems with Twitter as well, including spots around Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. One of the most dense spots of trouble was in Japan.

As often happens when one social media platform goes down, users rushed to others to discuss it. On Facebook, posts about Twitter being down began to pile up. There, many people reported issues with the site, saying that they had returned to Facebook to make sure that their Internet in general was still working.

In fairness to Twitter, this phenomenon runs in the opposite direction as often as not. Facebook has experienced several mass outages in 2019, and each time there is an apparent spike in traffic on Twitter, as users go there for their social media fix. To make matters worse, Facebook is the parent company for Instagram, driving even more people from one platform onto another.

So far, there is no word on what caused Saturday's sluggishness on Twitter, but it appears the issue is already improving. Many outages have reportedly been resolved, and users are getting back to their feeds. Knowing Twitter, there will be some snarky comments about the problems before the weekend is out.