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Twitter’s massive outage may be over, company says ‘no evidence’ of hack

Twitter’s massive outage may be over, company says ‘no evidence’ of hack

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The cause is unclear

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter has been experiencing an outage that began in the early evening on Thursday, with some users reporting problems sending tweets and refreshing their timelines starting shortly after 5:30PM ET. Just after 7PM ET, tweets began to cross our timelines, and things may be returning to normal.

“We have no evidence of a security breach or hack, and we’re currently investigating internal causes,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. Twitter posted a similar message to its status page and via the @TwitterSupport Twitter account.

Twitter’s last major outage, occurring in February of this year, still allowed users to circumvent that outage by scheduling tweets. This wasn’t a useable workaround during the outage, as far as we could tell. Verge staffers were seeing the outage across the United States and in the UK, though we were able to send a few DMs through the platform while the outage was happening.

Twitter’s API status website initially said everything was operational. At 5:56PM ET, Twitter posted a message to the API page reading, “Investigating — We are currently investigating this issue. More updates to come.” At 6:31PM ET, there was a new but also unspecific message: “We are continuing to monitor as our teams investigate. More updates to come.”

Update 7:21PM ET: Added official tweet from Twitter.

Update 7:04PM ET: Added new statement from Twitter and updated headline.

Update 6:54PM ET: Added new update from Twitter’s API page and changed headline to say that the outage has lasted for more than an hour.

Update 6:28PM ET: Added Twitter statement.

Update 6:11PM ET: Added an update detailing the note on Twitter’s API page.