Twitter back up after global outage

Twitter said its service was back online following a major outage on Thursday (July 14) that kept thousands of users across the globe from accessing the social media platform.

The near three-hour outage affected as many as 50,000 users at its peak at around 8:15 am ET (8:15 pm Singapore time), according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

The incident comes days after Twitter sued Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk for violating his deal to buy the company and asked a Delaware court to order the world's richest person to complete the takeover

"We had some trouble with our internal systems that impacted many of you globally. Twitter should be up and running as expected," the social media company said in a tweet.

Twitter is hosted on Amazon Web Services and also uses Google Cloud as its secondary vendor, Wells Fargo Securities analyst Brian Fitzgerald said.

The analyst ruled out a problem at cloud vendors as a reason for the disruption.

Twitter had suffered another widespread outage in February that it blamed on a software glitch.

Other big technology companies have also been hit by outages in the past year, with a near six-hour disruption at Meta Platforms keeping WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger out of reach for billions of users in October. 

Notorious for outages in its early years, Twitter was known for using its popular "Fail Whale" illustration, which showed a beluga whale being lifted by birds, during such incidents.

Twitter shares were down about 1 per cent at $36.42 (S$51.12) on Thursday.

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