According to Twitter’s status blog and all of Facebook, the service appears to be experiencing site-wide issues, including errors on just about every single feature of the site.
So far, I’ve only been able to send and receive DMs without error; however you can still tweet. You just won’t see it. Along with the timeline refresh issue, you aren’t able to view anyone’s profile at the moment, which is a big problem, considering that a lot of traffic comes to the site via these pages popping up in Google search results.
Here’s the page of empty sadness that you’ll see when you click on someone’s beautiful avatar:
These issues have been going on for about 15 minutes, with Twitter’s engineering staff posting about it seven minutes ago. The issues are also affecting mobile apps, as you’ll get a similar error message when trying to update your timelines. Here’s what the status blog says as of right now:
Some users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter.
Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue.
Twitter has actually done quite well with its uptime over the past few years, having very few major events that bring every feature down like this. It is, however, interesting to see the company always say that “some users” are experiencing issues, when it’s quite clear that more than “some” of them are.
We’ve reached out to Twitter for more information, but have yet to hear back. We don’t usually hear about why issues happen, just that they’ve been resolved, so don’t expect anything in-depth.
UPDATE: It appears that Twitter is bringing all of its features back. Feel free to tweet about how that was the worst 41 minutes or so of your life.
UPDATE 2: According to the status blog, Twitter is back to normal. Also, I take back what I said about Twitter not providing any reasons as to why this happened:
Update: This issue has been resolved.
Due to an error in a routine change, Twitter was not available from 1:08pm PDT to 1:33pm PDT. We rolled back the erroneous change as soon as we identified the issue. Additionally, some users may have experienced Tweet delivery delay from 1:33pm PDT and 1:53pm PDT. We apologize for the inconvenience.
[Unnecessary Disclosure: I’ll be moving on to Yahoo! soon]