- Twitter said in a tweet Thursday that the site "should be working for everyone within the next few hours" after an outage "caused by an inadvertent change we made to our internal systems."
- Some Twitter users appeared to be experiencing issues Thursday, with many unable to reload their home timeline or post tweets to the social platform.
- Twitter said on its status website that it was investigating an "unresolved incident" caused by irregularities found in Twitter's application programming interfaces.
- "We know people are having trouble Tweeting and using Twitter. We're working to fix this issue as quickly as possible," the company told Business Insider.
- The apparent outage comes after Twitter has faced criticism for its handling of a dubiously sourced New York Post article regarding Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
- Twitter banned the article from being shared on the site, prompting President Trump and Republicans to decry the company, saying it was harboring an anti-conservative bias.
Twitter's communications team said in a tweet Thursday evening that it expects the site to be up and running for all users within a few hours after a widespread outage left many unable to post tweets or load their timeline.
"The recent issue was caused by an inadvertent change we made to our internal systems. Twitter should be working for everyone within the next few hours," the company said.
in an earlier tweet, Twitter also said that it didn't "have any evidence of a security breach or hack."
Some Twitter users experienced issues Thursday, receiving an error message on the platform's homepage and being unable to reload the page, as well as having trouble tweeting. Downdetector, a site that aggregates reports of website outages, identified a spike in outage reports from around 2pm to 3:30pm PST.
"We know people are having trouble Tweeting and using Twitter. We're working to fix this issue as quickly as possible," a Twitter spokesperson told Business Insider in an email earlier on Thursday.
According to the company's status page, Twitter was investigating an "unresolved incident" and irregularities found with Twitter application programming interfaces.
"We are continuing to monitor the issue, and things appear to have returned to normal," the site said as of around 7pm PT.
"For streams, if your connection was maintained during this period, you should have received available data since this issue also affected the publishing side of Twitter. If you disconnected at all, a Replay will recover any Tweets during your disconnect, and the volume is likely to be very small."
It's the latest speed bump for the company in a week during which it has faced criticism for its handling of a dubiously sourced New York Post article on Wednesday regarding Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, and a Ukrainian official.
Twitter banned the article from being circulated on the site, without offering an explanation as to why. The company later came forward and said the ban was because of a hacking-material policy, saying that it didn't "want to incentivize hacking by allowing Twitter to be used as distribution for possibly illegally obtained materials."
Thursday's outage comes as the platform has experienced many similar issues this year, with the most recent on October 1. The incident was quickly resolved.
It also grappled with a massive hack in July that saw more than 100 accounts, including those of Bill Gates, former President Barack Obama, and Elon Musk, compromised in a bitcoin scam, drawing criticism from lawmakers and cybersecurity experts.