Twitter back online after a massive outage that wiped out timelines for millions

how to get back the old Twitter font — (Image credit: Shutterstock)

Twitter suffered an outage earlier today, with the social network failing to load for some people, including us at Tom's Guide, as well as not accepting logins for others.

As it stands, this outage hasn't been officially confirmed. But plenty of users reported an outage, with the timelines of millions seemingly wiped out with no access to recent tweets.

Out Global Editor in Chief, Mark Spoonauer noted that Twitter simply wasn't working for him and appeared to have logged him out, as you can see in the image below.

An image of Mark Spoonauer's Twitter — (Image credit: Future)

In comparison, my Twitter (Roland Moore-Colyer) ended up loading fine on mobile, though the refreshing of the timeline appeared to be a little slow. There was a chance that I missed the major part of the outage.

According to a variety of reports, this outage started at 5:15 a.m. ET (around 10 a.m. GMT) according to Downdetector, a website that tracks whether popular websites are down. But some have noted that the site isn't the most reliable when it comes to tracking outages.

When I checked Downdetector, the number of users reporting Twitter problems had started dropping off. This would indicate that the social network was getting back on top of this outage.

An image of Downdetector showing how Twitter is out — (Image credit: Downdetector)

Of course, when the outage did hit there was a sudden surge of reports on Downdetector and rather quickly "#TwitterDown" got trending.

But now Twitter is back up and running again, for better or worse.

What caused this outage isn't clear. But ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the social network has arguably been more ropey than ever before. Oddities with timelines have popped up, and now in a controversial move, Twitter will only let users get access to two-factor authentication if they pay for Twitter Blue, the premium tier of Twitter.

If you've had enough of Twitter, then take a look at our 3 best Twitter alternatives to try now, as well as find out what Masterdon is all about.

Roland Moore-Colyer a Managing Editor at Tom’s Guide with a focus on news, features and opinion articles. He often writes about gaming, phones, laptops and other bits of hardware; he’s also got an interest in cars. When not at his desk Roland can be found wandering around London, often with a look of curiosity on his face.