Twitter wasn’t hacked, company says after fixing global outage that lasted almost two hours

Users on every continent had reported being unable to use the platform, with the outage particularly concentrated in the US and Japan

The incident marked a new setback for Twitter, which is fending off accusations of bias over its move to block a report critical of US presidential candidate Joe Biden

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Twitter said the incident was caused by ‘by an inadvertent change we made to our internal systems’. Photo: TNS

Published: 9:34am, 16 Oct 2020Updated: 9:35am, 16 Oct 2020

Twitter said it had no evidence of a hack or security breach as users across the globe saw widespread service outages on the social media platform used by hundreds of millions worldwide.

The firm said the outage on Thursday evening, which lasted nearly two hours, was caused “by an inadvertent change we made to our internal systems”.

The incident marked a new setback for the network, which is fending off accusations of bias over its decision to block a news report critical of Democratic White House candidate Joe Biden.

Just before midnight on Friday, it was possible to carry out certain functions, such as retweeting a post, but many users were still unable to send a new tweet.

“Something went wrong, but don’t fret – let’s give it another shot,” an error message said.

According to downdetector.com, users on every continent had reported being unable to use the platform, but the outages were concentrated on the east and west coasts of the United States, as well as Japan.

Twitter this week has been fending off accusations of bias since taking the dramatic step of reducing the reach of a New York Post article critical of Biden and drawing a harsh rebuke from conservatives.