Twitter suffers brief global outage

Microblogging platform Twitter suffered a brief outage across several countries including India on Thursday as several users could not log into the app, access their feed or publish tweets. Many users received alerts such as "503 Service Unavailable" when they tried to access Twitter. This alert usually shows when servers are temporarily unable to handle requests. 

Around 397 users reported disruption of service on Twitter between 5.16 pm and 5.31pm IST on Downdetector, the online platform that provides real time information on website outages. 

According to Downdetector, in India, the outage was reported from major cities such as New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata, Lucknow, Ahmedabad, and Hyderabad. Around 70% of the outages were on desktop while 29% were reported by app users. 

"Some of you are having issues accessing Twitter and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone. Thanks for sticking with us," Twitter said in a post. 

This is the second global outage involving Twitter this year. In February, the social network was reportedly down for almost 60 minutes. Twitter had then said that the outage was caused by a “technical bug” that disrupted timelines from loading and tweets from getting posted. 

India is the third-largest market for Twitter after the US and Japan, according to market research firm Statista. It had 23.6 million monthly active users (MAU) in India as of January 2022, while US and Japan had 76.9 million and 58 million users, respectively. 

The company is also involved in a legal dispute with Tesla CEO Elon Musk after he decided to back out from the $44 billion deal to acquire it over Twitter's failure to provide accurate information on number of bot users on the platform.