Twitter services went down for several users on Wednesday morning, according to the online service status tracker Downdetector. According to the tracker which analyses tens of millions of daily problem alerts, the reports from Twitter users complaining of services going down peaked around 8 this morning; however, the graph soon showed a reduction in the number of complaints indicating that the services were soon restored.
As per the Twitter status report page on Downdetector, there were as many as 455 reports at 8:03am, the second such peak in a day which also had the baseline peaking with reports at around 5am. Around 52 per cent of users complaining of Twitter services going down specified the issue as relating to the Twitter website, while 38 per cent of users reported that the issue was with the Twitter app. Meanwhile, 10 per cent of users said that the Twitter snag was a result of an error in the server connection.
The reported technical snag on Twitter comes days after the Facebook family of apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, went dark on earlier this month for nearly six hours before services began to be gradually restored.
How does Downdetector work?
Downdetector, according to its official website, offers real-time status information for more than 6,000 services across 45 websites representing 45 countries. When a service provider’s customers are experiencing problems, Downdetector aggregates and analyses this data to determine the potential nature of the issue and then works to alert both the company and community of possible issues.
The live outage map, which shows the ‘spikes’ in reports over time, helps users gauge the kind of response the website is getting across the world. If there are a number of spikes corresponding to the timestamps, like in the image above, it means other users too are experiencing similar problems with the website and it’s not just a singular case of bad internet. Downdetector also has a daily historical view of problem reports compared to the baseline volume.
As more and more users submit problem reports directly on a company status page on Downdetector, along with an indicator of the type of problem they are experiencing, the tracking service gathers data through Twitter and uses ‘sentiment analysis’ to detect issues for a given company and its location. It also looks at other key indicators from across the web to determine if an extraordinary volume of users is having issues with a monitored company or service.