Twitter is facing its own outages as Facebook users flock to other sites

By Andrew Martonik Published October 5, 2021

When Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram all went down, the groundswell of people rushing to other platforms to continue their social posting and messaging — likely to poke fun at Facebook, frankly — was intense. So much so, it seems, that Twitter is also experiencing problems.

Everyone’s favorite doomsday watchlist Downdetector shows many reports of issues with Twitter, and staff members here at Digital Trends are seeing intermittent problems loading tweets — both on the timeline and from individual links. So far the issue doesn’t seem universal, and content usually loads after a handful of page refreshes, so we can hope this is a little blip and not the start of a larger problem.

Twitter failing to load a tweet — Image used with permission by copyright holder

While Facebook seems to be facing a serious issue with its servers stemming from what are reportedly major DNS problems, what looks to be happening at Twitter is more of a stutter as a result of a dramatic increase in usage. And you can imagine that the team inside Twitter is doing everything it can to make sure the site stays up and operational.

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Sometimes more people than usual use Twitter. We prepare for these moments, but today things didn’t go exactly as planned. Some of you may have had an issue seeing replies and DMs as a result. This has been fixed. Sorry about that! 💙

— Support (@Support) October 4, 2021

Ironically, with nowhere else to go, “Now Twitter” has started trending on Twitter. How much longer can this go on? Maybe we can fire up some conference calls to stay connected.

This is a developing story

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Andrew Martonik

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Andrew Martonik is the Editor in Chief at Digital Trends, leading a diverse team of authoritative tech journalists.

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