Social media behemoth Twitter went dark for a full 45 minutes for users around the world on Thursday, its longest outage in several years. Users were met with a variety of error messages.
The platform has not offered any explanation for the prolonged outage, which began at around 8:05 ET. All Twitter products were affected – web, mobile, and the TweetDeck app – even as Twitter’s own website, which remained online, claimed “all systems operational.”
The company acknowledged the problem an hour after the initial reports of an outage, tweeting “we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone.” It was the platform’s first lengthy outage since February, when the service went down twice in one week due to a “technical bug.”
On Tuesday, Twitter sued billionaire Elon Musk in the Delaware Court of Chancery for attempting to back out of the $44 billion acquisition deal he agreed to in April. The company’s lawyers called his efforts to cancel the agreement “invalid and wrongful,” declaring they would attempt to “compel consummation of the merger upon satisfaction of the few outstanding conditions.”
Twitter accused Musk of acting like a spoiled child, suggesting that he believes that he – “unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law – is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away.” Twitter stock had plunged 34% below its value at the time Musk agreed to buy the company.
The world’s richest man announced the deal was off on Friday, claiming the social giant had failed to comply with its “contractual obligations,” specifically by declining to reveal the percentage of bot and spam accounts on the platform.