Users across the US and Europe were unable to access Twitter on Thursday evening, for reasons unknown, getting an error message saying the social media platform is “over capacity.”
The outage-tracking website DownDetector noted a sharp spike in complaints about Twitter around 9:30pm GMT, and the outage map shows the US and UK most affected.
The unexplained blackout comes just hours before the competing televised town halls featuring US President Donald Trump and his Democrat challenger Joe Biden, which replaced the debate originally scheduled for October 15 when it was scrapped due to disagreement over a sudden rule change.
It also happens to follow a day of intense criticism of the platform, for its efforts to quash the sharing of a New York Post story about Biden’s son Hunter and his business dealings with Ukraine and China. In addition to flagging the link to the article as “potentially harmful” and claiming it violated policy on sharing “hacked” materials, Twitter locked the accounts of multiple people who shared it – from actor James Woods and White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany to House Judiciary Committee Republicans and journalists.
The cause of Thursday evening’s outage is not known as of yet. On its status page, Twitter said it was investigating an “irregularity” involving its application programming interfaces (APIs).
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
