Twitter users experienced a number of issues on Thursday evening which Twitter said was not related to a hack or security breach.
What We Know:
- Twitter users reported not being able to send tweets or refresh their timelines. According to Downdetector, over 57,000 people reported issues by 6 pm. The problem seemed to have been resolved by around 9 pm.
- Twitter said that the outage was “caused by an inadvertent change we made to our internal systems”. After tweets started loading and the timeline started working properly, people still had issues accessing their bookmarked tweets.
- Twitter previously experienced a notable issue in July. Several high profile accounts, including those of Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, and Kim Kardashian West, were the targets of a hack. Regulators later found that the security breach started from a tech support scam.
- Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are under a lot of public and governmental scrutiny ahead of the November 3 election. The sites have to make sure that they can’t be compromised and that they are cracking down on dangerous disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories.
Tech giants are being watched more closely than ever and are being held accountable for the content on their platforms. The FCC is preparing to draft new regulations for social media companies.
