Twitter Down, Leaving Users Scrambling to Find Platform to Comment on Outage

Twitter was down for thousands of users Friday evening, making it impossible to send short messages on the social media network. This was the second time in three weeks users reported an issue. The reports of Twitter going down began at around 8 p.m. ET. It was back up and running less than a half-hour later.

Twitter was unavailable on both the smartphone app and the desktop. People who tried to use the desktop version were met with a mostly blank white screen. It did show a message reading, “upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: connection failure.” According to DownDetector, it began receiving reports about Twitter outages at around 8 p.m. ET. Over 5,000 people reported Twitter was down on DownDetector.

With Twitter going down, many social media users searched for other outlets to comment on the outage. Many found Reddit where multiple people joked about how they couldn’t use Twitter to joke about their favorite social media platform going down when that platform is Twitter. “Didn’t know where else to look about Twitter being down, without Twitter,” one person wrote. “Guys, I think it was me. I just made a new Twitter account and as soon as I verified it, Twitter died. I’m sorry,” another joked.

Once Twitter was back up and running, users began joking about what life is like without the platform. “Think I went back to the stone age when Twitter shut down for a second,” one person wrote. “Omg Twitter went down and I had to go over to FB for entertainment,” another joked.

The other social networks often go down for periods of time as well. Facebook, which also runs Instagram, was down for a time earlier this month. “And we’re back! Earlier today, a configuration change caused Facebook services to be unavailable to some people,” Facebook wrote in a statement, which was humorously posted on Twitter. “Since then, we have quickly investigated and resolved the issue.”