Twitter Is Fixed After Users Across The World Faced Glitches, Outages

NEW YORK CITY, NY — Twitter experienced significant glitches and usage outages across the world Friday morning and into the afternoon, significantly hindering use of the popular social media platform for the hundreds of millions of users who use the website and app. Different regions encountered various levels of disruption, with the Northeast of the United States, parts of Europe, Japan and southeastern Brazil experiencing the most difficulty.

"Earlier today some users may have experienced issues sending Tweets, this issue has now been resolved, thank you for your patience!" tweeted the Twitter Support account early in the day. Despite the optimism of the first tweet, it added later: "Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter & Tweeting. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution."

Eventually, Twitter announced the problem had been fixed: "We're happy to let you know that the issue is now resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience!"

The company never specified what caused the problem to begin with.

Functionality of the platform varied throughout the day. At some points, Twitter feeds updated very slowly or not at all and tweeting was impossible. At other times, the site seemed to work smoothly. Down Detector, which tracks user outages for a variety of services across the globe, showed the extent of the disruption in real time.

Patch reached out to Twitter for information about the cause but received no response.

Photo by Bethany Clarke/Getty Images