Access to the service began failing over the web, mobile and its API (application programming interface, the system that applications use to speak to the Twitter service) at 8:20am GMT, with error messages warning the network is both “over capacity” and suffering an “internal error”.
Twitter’s own status board updated at 9:00, confirming the outage, and the company’s developer-facing monitoring confirmed that four of the five public APIs were down, suffering a “service disruption”. At 8:47, the search API was upgraded to “performance issues”. By 8:55am, a second API was upgraded to “performance issues”, and some users were able to sporadically access the service.
The company initially confirmed the outage by, somehow, tweeting, from its@support account. We were unable to see the tweet, because Twitter was down. Twitter emailed the text of the tweet to the Guardian, which read: “Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution.”
