Epic Twitter crash hits millions

An error message display during Twitter’s Friday morning crash.

Social network Twitter suffered a major outage on Friday, leaving millions of panicked addicts unable to post to the site from their PCs and mobile devices.

The outage took the social network offline globally for lengthy periods between 2am and 4.30am AEST on Friday.

In a status-update blog posted about 2.30am, Twitter said: “Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter.

“Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.”

Shortly after 3am, service appeared to have been restored but with some news sites on the internet reporting patchy service and ongoing network errors.

However, the site went down again about 4am for up to 30 minutes, with error messages returning to Twitter pages across the globe.

The outage appeared to hit Twitter to such an extent that the network couldn’t even display its once-omnipresent Fail Whale, which was a common sight during the site’s early days.

Twitter users reported outages of up to an hour during the failure, and many took to Facebook as a substitute while Twitter engineers resuscitated the site.

Sighs of relief were rapidly posted to the social network in the brief window that service was restored between 3am and 4am, along with a smattering of jokes:

• @BorowitzReport: “You learn a lot when #Twitter is down. For example, my wife left me four years ago.”
• @b3witched_: “You realise how sad your life is when Twitter crashes for an hour and you have no idea what to do.”
• @joanwalsh: “Whew, I really needed Twitter to tell me that everyone else was freaked out that Twitter was down.”

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