Bosses rejoice, productivity rises: Twitter is experiencing sporadic worldwide outages
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}A sign displays the Twitter logo on the front of the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Nov. 7, 2013. (Reuters)
Companies everywhere will likely see increased bursts of productivity from certain employees today, seemingly at random. The reason? Twitter is currently experiencing sporadic outages worldwide.
The outages seemed to begin at the beginning of the workday in Europe, with users first noticing issues around 9 a.m. GMT. The vast majority of the outages seemed to be concentrated in Europe, but reports of trouble reaching Twitter came from across the globe. We can confirm minor issues reaching the site in New York, which currently seem to have been resolved.
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{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}For its part, Twitter is well aware of the problem. "Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter," a bulletin posted on the Twitter status board earlier today reads. "We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution."
A message on Twitter's Performance and Availability Status page indicates that Twitter initially believed the problem to be short lived. "Between 06:23 a.m. and 06:33 a.m. PST some users were experiencing issues accessing Twitter via mobile and Web," the message reads. "This issue has now been resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience."
Despite the above message, users are still experiencing issues, though perhaps not as many as when the outages first began. Fortunately, things seem to be looking up. Currently three of five services are listed as "operating normally," while one service shows a "service disruption" status and another is listed as suffering from "performance issues.
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These issues used to be fairly common in the early days of the site, with the company even creating a lovable mascot shown during outages known as the "fail whale." In recent years, the company has significantly strengthened its server infrastructure, though this incident proves that it isn't bulletproof.
Since this is an issue with Twitter's servers, both the website and mobile apps are affected, so if you were hoping to get around the problem by switching to a different client, you're out of luck. It seems that Twitter is hard at work on restoring service, so all affected users can do is try to be patient or, barring that, find another way to kill a few minutes.