“You might have had trouble tweeting, getting notifications, or viewing direct messages. We are currently working on a fix and should be back to normal soon,” the company stated.
A global ‘partial’ outage of micro blogging site Twitter which also affected Indian users for hours disrupted conversations and engagements on the platform for a major part of the day on Wednesday. While Twitter on Wednesday evening said that the issue was ‘just about fixed’, #Twitterdown was trending in India with over 14,000 tweets and several users complaining later how they were unable to tweet, retweet, see notifications and send direct messages and photos.
Twitter, through its handle Twitter Support had initially tweeted that it was experiencing outages across Twitter and TweetDeck, its social media dashboard application for management of Twitter accounts.
“You might have had trouble tweeting, getting notifications, or viewing direct messages. We are currently working on a fix and should be back to normal soon,” the company stated.
It could not be ascertained how many Indian users were impacted by the outage. In a response to ET’s queries, a Twitter spokesperson cited the Twitter Support tweets and said most of the issues had been fixed. “It is business as usual,” the spokesperson added.
As per market research firm Statista, Twitter has over 34 million active users in India.
Several Indian users said they were unable to view notifications and tweet during the outage while some said they could check tweets on their phone but not on their computers.
“I got a panic attack” stated an Indian user post discovering the outage while another tweeted saying during the outage Twitter felt like the Twitter version of 2011 when there were no images.
Twitter did not specify the reason for the outage. While clicking on notifications, users said they were met with a ‘nothing to see here yet’ comment. While attempting to tweet or retweet, the platform said ‘something went wrong and that users should check their connections and try again.’
Prashant Puri, CEO of digital marketing firm AdLift said Twitter’s usage as a spot advertising platform for promoted ads would have hurt advertisers who had planned ads on the platform for Wednesday.
“Advertisements on Twitter are used as teasers before launching campaigns on other platforms and are labelled as promoted. They last for a day,” he added.
Security experts said since the reasons were not specified by the company for the outage, the implications from a security perspective could not be ascertained.
