Twitter globally down for thousands of users

Twitter was down for thousands of users across the globe recently, its first such outage since February, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

There were more than 50,000 incidents of people reporting issues with Twitter in the United States, according to the website. Users in other countries including the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil and Italy also reported issues.

The outage comes days after Twitter sued Elon Musk for violating his $44 billion deal to buy the company and asked a Delaware court to order the world's richest person to complete the takeover.

The outage began around 6:00 PM BST and prevented users from logging into the micro-blogging site on desktops and mobile phones.

It was not clear what caused the outage. Users were getting an error message: "Tweets aren't loading right now." Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but its status dashboard indicated that all systems were operational.

The company 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 interruption keeping Meta Platforms' WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger out of the reach of billions of users in October.

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Notorious for outages in its early years, Twitter used to use its popular "Fail Whale" illustration, a beluga being lifted by birds, for such incidents but discontinued the logo in 2013.

Those who could use Twitter jokingly blamed the outage on Musk, the chief executive of Tesla.

"Elon Musk creates Twitter outage," one user tweeted.

Twitter shares were marginally down at $36.60 before the bell on Thursday.