It’s Friday morning, so let’s all kick the weekend off by panicking, shall we? If you're currently asking yourself if Twitter is down right now... well, it might be, depending on who and where you are. The horror! The horror! The cause of potential outage is not currently known; Bustle has reached out to Twitter for more information and will update if/when we hear back.
Update: The Independent reports that a DDoS attack has apparently taken down systems run by Dyn, Inc., which is one of the biggest providers of internet services in the world. The attack has impacted Twitter and many other sites, including Reddit and Spotify. In a statement provided to Bustle, Scott Hilton, EVP, Products at Dyn, Inc said:
This morning, Oct. 21, Dyn received a global DDoS attack on our Managed DNS infrastructure in the East Coast of the United States. DNS traffic resolved from East Coast name server locations are experiencing a service degradation or intermittent interruption during this time.during this time.
We have been aggressively mitigating the DDoS attack against our infrastructure. Services have been restored to normal as of 13:20 UTC.
Customers with questions or concerns are encouraged to check our status page for updates and reach out to our Technical Support Team.
Update #2: A second DDoS attack has been detected; as of approximately 2:00 p.m., Dyn's engineers are continuing to investigate and mitigate the issues, according to the Dyn updates page.
Earlier: Here is what I know so far: When I attempted to access Twitter at about 8:00 a.m. EST this morning, I was greeted with an obnoxious “cannot access page” screen. Because social media outages are old hat by now, my immediate reaction was to go to both Is It Down? and Down Detector to find out if it was just me, or if it was a bigger issue. And hey, guess what? It’s a bigger issue! Fun times!
According to Is It Down Right Now?, Twitter is experiencing a “Likely Service Disruption.” More information is available at Down Detector; according to the graph displayed on the site, it looks like reports of problems began rolling in roughly around 7:00 a.m., spiking at about 8:00 (right about when I was discovering the issue myself):
But since that still doesn’t tell us a whole lot, it’s worth checking out the outage map at Down Detector, as well. It looks like it’s mostly the United States that’s affected by the current Twitter issues:
Specifically the East Coast:
If we zoom in even more, we can see that the outage is affecting folks as far north as Maine and as far south as the Carolinas; it also stretches as far west as Indiana:
I’ve been unable to determine whether the outage is spreading beyond those borders, but I’ll keep checking to see what I can find.
Worth noting, though, that exactly why the map reads as it does also has something to do with, y’know, time zones. Since it’s currently only about 5:30 in the morning on the West Coast, for example, there are likely fewer people awake over there — and therefore fewer people browsing Twitter and reporting issues. So… do with that what you will.
And as for what we can do in the meantime? Unfortunately, not much. There are a number of different reasons why Twitter might be malfunctioning, but since we don’t know what the cause of this particular problem is, there isn’t much to do but wait it out. In the meantime, why not take the opportunity to catch up on your Snaps or your Instagram Stories? After all, just because one social media site is down doesn’t mean they’re all down; we’ve got plenty to keep us occupied while we wait. We'll get through this, you guys. We always do.
So, uh… happy Friday, y’all? Or… something.
Image: Unsplash; Down Detector (4)
