(Bloomberg) — Twitter Inc. faced a brief outage on Thursday, leaving thousands of users without service for about an hour.
At the peak, at 8:20 a.m. in New York, 54,582 users reported problems on Downdetector.com, an outage tracking platform.
Twitter’s website displayed an error message and prompted users to reload the page. It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the outage.
A message on Twitter’s support account posted at 9:10 a.m.
said: “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.”
By 9:16 a.m., about 1,600 users reported they were still having trouble.
The last time Twitter faced an outage was in February, when the site crashed due to a “technical bug” on the page.
In its early days, Twitter was famous for crashing amid high traffic, leading to the iconic “fail whale” image that popped up when service was down.
Twitter is in the midst of a legal battle with Elon Musk, who is attempting to back out of an agreement to buy the social media site for $44 billion.
Musk, a prolific tweeter with more than 100 million followers, claims Twitter hasn’t been forthcoming in providing information about the number of fake accounts on the site. The social media company has said it needs only four days in court to prove that the billionaire should be forced to honor his pledge.
Twitter shares were little changed at $36.58 at 9:43 a.m.
in New York.
(Updates with Twitter response. A previous version of the story corrected the spelling of Downdetector in the headline)
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