Twitter experiencing frequent outages worldwide

Twitter has been hit with multiple, ongoing outages across western Europe, the UK, Japan and the east coast of the US, according to reports. Visitors to the site are being greeted with the error message: “Something is technically wrong.”

Both Twitter’s mobile service and website have experienced outages throughout the day. According to DownDetector the service has seen severe outages across Japan while Europe and the US have been only moderately affected.

Outage Report, another online monitoring service, has labelled the outage as ‘extreme’ with 1,700 user-submitted outage reports in the last 20 minutes alone.

A Twitter spokesperson confirmed to Bustle.com that the tech giant is aware of the issues and working to resolve them as quickly as possible.

"Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter & Tweeting. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution," the spokesperson wrote.

The issues began at 1:05am EDT, according to Down Detector, and have peaked multiple times throughout the course of Friday.

Website users have been disproportionately affected while fewer reports of issues have been submitted for the mobile application.

Twitter experienced similar outages on May 12 but these were resolved in less than two hours.

Users on Down Detector have provided live updates on the situation from around the world.

“Seems to be better in NYC, I've gotten a couple of tweets posted...whether they sneaked through or the system's back up, I'm not sure,” wrote one anonymous user.

Another speculated that it might be a Denial of Service or DDoS attack, though the intermittent nature of the outages would suggest this is unlikely to be the cause.

“This looks like a major #DDOS attack. but why? and why now?”

“While Twitter has acknowledged the problem, it’s yet to communicate the reason for the downtime. Not only has the app itself failed – Twitter’s firefighting strategy has proved disappointing,” Sven Hammar, founder & chief strategy officer at Apica Systems, which specializes in website testing, optimization and monitoring told RT.

“In the event of an outage, marketing teams should have a proactive strategy in place for their customers to promptly communicate why the service degradation has occurred, and what measures are being taken to resolve it,” he added.