WASHINGTON — Two social media giants experienced global outages on Thursday.
Twitter users across the world reported disruptions in service Thursday morning. As the afternoon rolled in, Instagram was crashing for some users as well.
The website DownDetector.com, which tracks outage reports submitted by users, indicated a large spike in Twitter disruptions starting at about 8:05 a.m. Eastern. By 8:15 a.m., the number of reported issues passed 50,000. After 8:30 a.m. Eastern, those numbers steadily declined.
Around 9 a.m. Eastern, it appeared Twitter's service was back up and running.
However, Instagram's issues arose at about 4:30 p.m. Eastern, with over 20,000 complaints on the DownDetector website. The issues, which would automatically close out users from the social media app, appeared resolved at about 6:00 p.m.
The outage issues had been impacting Twitter's mobile app, website and the TweetDeck app.
On the mobile app, some users were getting a message that "Tweets aren't loading right now. Try again." Some using the desktop site were logged out and then when attempting to log back in were sent to an error page that stated: "Something went wrong, but don’t fret — it’s not your fault. Let’s try again."
There's been no official word yet on what may have caused Thursday's outage.
Internet monitoring group Netblocks, which tracks attempts to intentionally block internet access, says Twitter was “experiencing major international outages” but it was “not related to country-level internet disruptions or filtering.”
Thursday's disruption comes as Twitter is settling in for a major legal fight against Elon Musk. Twitter sued Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday, trying to force him to complete his $44 billion takeover of the social media company by accusing him of “outlandish” and “bad faith” actions that have caused the platform irreparable harm and “wreaked havoc” on its stock price.
Back in April, Musk pledged to pay $54.20 a share for Twitter Inc., which agreed to those terms after reversing its initial opposition to the deal. But the two sides have been bracing for a legal fight since the billionaire said Friday that he was backing away from his agreement to buy the company.
Twitter’s lawsuit in Delaware Chancery Court asserts that “Musk refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.