While some of you were wasting your lives sleeping, others were struggling to convey their profound life insights in less than 140 characters or look for info about last night's episode of The Bachelor—but were thwarted by a technical meltdown that affected Twitter users around the world. The Wall Street Journal called it "a major interruption... with some users unable to log on to the social-media service for more than two hours." #WHYGOD

The outage probably started around midnight PST, which meant Europe felt the brunt of it. When it came back (for some users), they started to use #TwitterDown to express their frustration.


A British social media consultant "joked": "I've had to talk to real people and that's a little bit frightening... Genuinely, I didn't know where to get my news from, I usually put a tweet out in the morning."

Twitter stated (via a Twitter account for support) , "Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution." The NY Times reports:

Although the disruptions were among the most extensive the company has yet encountered, Twitter is not the only popular social network to face technical problems. Facebook, whose users now number more than 1.5 billion people worldwide, has also had a spate of shutdowns over the last 18 months, though often the problems have been corrected within hours.

But because Twitter is an important news source, as well as a sounding board, for many people, the shutdowns were a significant disruption in the global conversation. When other technology and media companies have faced similar problems in the past, people have often turned to the platform to vent their frustration — an outlet unavailable because Twitter itself was the cause of the problem.

Isn't Twitter #dead anyway?