After Google, Twitter suffers a brief global outage and back

Micro-blogging site Twitter was down on Tuesday late night, affecting more than 40,000 users worldwide who were having trouble accessing the social media platform. Twitter, however, said that they have "fixed the issue" and the site is running as usual now.

The Twitter outage comes only a day after Alphabet Inc's Google services faced a brief outage, which the company said had “worked quickly” to address the fault and services were back running as normal.

“The Twitter outage started at 1.50 p.m. ET (11:38pm IST) and had as many as 35,000 reports at its peak,” said Downdetector.com, a website which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources including user-submitted errors on its platform.

At that time, Twitter's status page showed that all systems were operational, but it later acknowledged that some users were unable to access their timelines, adding that it was working on a fix. "We fixed it! We made an internal systems change that didn't go as planned and have rolled it back. Twitter should now be loading as expected. Sorry about that!" the microblogging site later tweeted.

Meanwhile, the service appears to be working normally in India, with some 500-odd users reportedly complained of being unable to access Twitter. Netblocks, a group that monitors intentional downtime of online services and the Internet, said that Twitter is experiencing international outages, but that the incident was not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering.  

In July, Twitter faced a nearly three-hour outage, impacting users in several countries including India with users complaining that they 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. Later the company said, it had some trouble with its internal systems that impacted many globally.

The social media company is in a legal tussle with Tesla CEO Elon Musk over his $44 billion takeover deal. Amid the ongoing legal dispute, Musk challenged Twitter's CEO Parag Agrawal to a public debate about the percentage of bots on the social media platform.

Tech outages (often called downtime) are becoming common in the IT industry, and refer to time durations when a system is unavailable owing to technical or mechanical issues and this can have a significant impact on the bottom line.

In June, US-based content delivery network and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) mitigation company Cloudflare, suffered an outage that impacted hundreds of high-profile online platforms and services, including online trading platform Zerodha, global cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, gaming platform Steam, video conferencing service Skype and edtech platform Udemy, among others. 

More recently, Microsoft’s Teams app too faced major outage on July 21, as more than 4,000 users said that they were unable to access any features on the app.