Horrors! Millions and millions of tweets were stifled​ or caught mid chirp today (Jan. 19, 2016) with a #Twitter_outage reported across all of its platforms beginning 8:20 am GMT and still sending me blank pages some six hours or so later at 9 am. EST.
The news left the 232 million regular #Twitter users #tweetless_in_Seattle, my hometown London Ontario and elsewhere on the planet.
Twitter and other leading social media are such an extension of people’s personality these days that Twitter deprivation​ causes panic like communicable bad hair.
Sounds like the start of a good #horror_story.
That observation wasn’t missed, especially those who managed to sneak in a tweet or two.
A Reuters news service article looked to fiction to get the pulse of what’s happening.
“This is like Inception,” a leading technology consultant James Martin managed to tweet.
The London-based tech author who goes by the handle @pundamentalism was referring to the 2010 science fiction film of tech-created dream worlds connected to deeper dream worlds in an endless staircase.
As for Twitter, its messaging sounded very untwitter-like when it fired out the usual corporate speak.
“Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter,” a statement on the company’s Twitter status website reads.
“We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution.” A company spokeswoman gave Reuters no further comment.
By 1000 GMT, some users in Europe started to see spotty service – hence James Martin’s maverick tweet.
Reports of outages came from across Europe, concentrated in Britain, France and Germany, according to monitoring service DownDetector.uk.
Outage reports came from Japan, Scandinavia, Spain, South Africa and here in Canada my in and out tweets were stuck in the dead mail file.​