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Twitter was down for more than an hour, reminding people of the fail whale.
Twitter suffered a large outage, leaving millions of users frustrated. When the users tried to use the social media network, they were shown a message that there were some technical problems and that they would be fixed as soon as possible.
The mobile apps were also broken and the Twitter representatives said that they were aware of the technical issue and that they were working towards solving it. According to the Down Detector website, Twitter faced a down spike on Tuesday morning, at 8AM in the United Kingdom. Also, 19 hours before the major outage, another outage of the website was reported. Most parts of the website were affected, as well as Tweetdeck.
The problems started to occur at 8:20AM, and the website, the mobile app and the application programming interface (API) were all affected. Error messages started to show up on the screen, like internal error or over capacity. At 9 AM Twitter confirmed the technical issues and assured the users that they are working on them. Apparently, at that time, four out of the five APIs were broken. Until 10 AM the problems were solved and most of the service returned to normal.
The technical issues of Twitter were found all around the world. The Down Detector website reported that the Western Europe and the United Kingdom were affected the most by the outage, as well as the United States East Coast. The fewer reports from the United States might have to do with the time difference.
When the website was at the beginning, users often were displayed a fail whale when they tried to access their Twitter accounts. When the drawing of the fail whale appeared, that meant that the site was down. Back then, the site was down more mostly because the architecture of the service didn’t allow it to expand its capacity normally. The servers weren’t added to the back end and when major events occurred, the weight of the users often collapsed the system.
In the recent years, that hasn’t occurred often, and even if it did, the problem was fixed much faster than in the past. The proof that the site has learned how to solve its problems quicker than in the past lies in the fact that this technical problem took only one hour to solve. Twitter is now a pretty reliable site when it comes to technical problems.
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