Twitter’s Brief Downtime Left Many Online With Humorous Theories Behind the Outage

Twitter was briefly down on Thursday, sparking plenty of hilarious theories about the outage. The social network was unavailable for most users for almost an hour before it finally returned to working shape around 7 p.m. ET. The outage also made it impossible for users to post messages from the mobile app.

According to Twitter, the company found an irregularity in its application programming interface (API), reports CNBC. The company later said there was a system change that went into effect earlier than planned. There was no evidence of a security break or hack, Twitter said.

“Twitter has been down for many of you and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone. We had some trouble with our internal systems and don’t have any evidence of a security breach or hack,” the company said. “Most of you should be back to Tweeting. The outage was caused by a system change initiated earlier [than] planned, affecting most of our servers. We’re working hard to bring Twitter back to normal and expect things to be fully resolved in 1-2 hours. We appreciate your patience.”

Although Twitter explained what happened, users instantly began theorizing what was behind the outage. Some even found it suspicious that it happened just before President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden started their competing town hall events on NBC and ABC, respectively. Twitter appeared to be up and running before either event began though. Here’s a look at some of the funnier theories floating around Thursday evening.

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One person wondered if Twitter deleted their account. Earlier this week, Trump’s campaign complained they were locked out of using their accounts because they shared a video about Hunter Biden and shared the unsubstantiated report from the New York Post on Biden’s son.

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One person joked that Twitter might have gone out to “get milk.” The tweet, featuring SpongeBob Squarepants, got plenty of funny replies itself. “Who hold on they pulled up in the driveway. They came back,” one person responded after Twitter began working again. 

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Facebook might have been happy to see Twitter go down for a period of time. After all, for about an hour, the only place you could go to complain about Twitter being down was Facebook.

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Was Twitter angry about something we did? One person theorized we were all being put in a corner for something we said. 

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Even when Twitter came back, some users noticed some notifications were missing. One person was worried that their bookmarks of cute animal videos were missing. In 2020, we all need cute animal videos, after all.

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One Twitter user was stunned to see that not only was the social network down, but she also reached “the end” of Instagram, Facebook’s photo-sharing app. They joked it was time to find their way out of The Matrix.