Twitter down across web, mobile interfaces

Twitter was unavailable for users worldwide on Tuesday morning, with the site apparently suffering a total outage followed by serious access problems lasting over an hour.

Twitter chose to communicate the problem via a tweet, in which the firm said it was aware of the problem.

Access to the service began failing over the web, mobile and its API (application programming interface, the system that applications use to speak to the Twitter service) at 8:20am GMT, with error messages warning the network is both “over capacity” and suffering an “internal error”.

Twitter’s own status board updated at 9:00, confirming the outage, and the company’s developer-facing monitoring confirmed that four of the five public APIs were down, suffering a “service disruption”. At 8:47, the search API was upgraded to “performance issues”. By 8:55am, a second API was upgraded to “performance issues”, and some users were able to sporadically access the service.