Earlier this evening, US time, (morning UK time) Twitter suffered an hour-long issue that froze user timelines and resulted in a significant delay in the delivery of new tweets. The issues initially affected Twitter.com and its mobile apps, but also caused problems for other apps, and began just after 23:00 PDT, 7:00 BST time.
TNW staff across Asia, Europe and North America were affected by the tweet jam on Twitter’s main site. Some third party services — including Twitter-owned Tweetdeck on the desktop, Hootsuite on the Web and the Tweetbot mobile apps — worked as usual at first, but were later also affected by the problems.
While the site was not taken offline, the fact that it was beset by this problem for almost an hour is a concern. Many users access the service via Twitter.com, so any issues there essentially cut them off from the service and take it offline for them.
Twitter is channelling its efforts to drive users to its own properties, ahead of third parties, in order to help its advertising services target and reach a larger proportion of its userbase. Obviously it needs to ensure that its service is working reliably in order to keep its users active and engaged.
We’ve reached out to Twitter for more information.
Headline image via westm / Flickr
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