Twitter was tangled up in global disruptions for some of its 320 million users overnight Tuesday, with some members unable to log on or stay connected on the social network for more than an hour.
“Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter,” the company said on its official status blog. The company’s support account Tweeted at 11:41 p.m. PT Monday that it was aware of the disruption and was working to fix it. A Twitter representative declined to comment to TheWrap beyond the company’s official service handle and blog.
The outage harkens back to the Twitter’s early years, when the social network’s technological resources struggled to keep pace with its ballooning popularity. The frequency of outages, which were typically accompanied by a error graphic of a white whale caught in a net held aloft by tiny birds, led to its own Internet meme: Fail Whale.
Short, localized outages are common not only for Twitter but also other social networks and popular websites. Twitter has had a couple barely perceptible interruptions earlier this month, and it experienced a spate of brief disruptions in November as well.
But extended outages that last more than an hour are rare.
Twitters’s status site for developers showed that by Tuesday morning in North America, many of its operations were back to normal, though it continued to report problems on home timelines.