Twitter is in the middle of one of the site’s longest outages for years, with the social network completely unavailable to users around the globe on web and mobile.
According to Downdetector.co.uk, which tracks site outages, the service became unavailable at 12:55pm UK time. The site appears to have failed globally, with outages reported in the UK, US and Europe.
The outage is on-track to become the longest in years. Although Twitter was notorious for collapsing under heavy load in its early days, with older users fondly recalling the “fail whale” error message that appeared when the service was over capacity, it has not had a multi-hour outage since 2016, when it was unaccessible for two and a half hours.
Since then, the site’s importance to global politics and culture has only grown, and a long-lasting outage could even have a material effect on the Conservative party’s leadership election, where runners and riders have been trading barbs since Boris Johnson announced his resignation last week.
Twitter has not responded to a request for comment. On the site’s own status dashboard, the social network and all related services are wrongly marked as “operational”.
