Twitter service restored after global platform outage

Twitter was restored Thursday night after a glitch caused a nearly two-hour global outage on the social media platform used by hundreds of millions around the world.

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The outage marked a further setback for the company, which for the past two days has been defending itself against allegations of bias over its decision to block a news report criticizing Democratic White House candidate Joe Biden.

“We continue to monitor the problem and things appear to have returned to normal,” the application programming interface site Twitter said at 0011 GMT on Friday.

The California-based company previously tweeted: “We had some problems with our internal systems and we have no evidence of a security breach or hacking.

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

The blackout appeared to have started around 2130 GMT.

Bias?

The shutdown of Twitter came at a delicate time. This week, the company took the dramatic step of reducing the scope of a New York Post article criticizing Biden, prompting a harsh rebuke from conservatives.

Thursday’s outage was the latest glitch to take Twitter offline. The platform experienced a one-hour outage in July 2019, one that lasted several hours a year ago and another in February.

More worrying are hacking attacks on popular social media platforms like Twitter.

In July, prominent Americans, including former President Barack Obama, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and Tesla boss Elon Musk, saw their Twitter accounts hacked.

The attack targeted at least 130 accounts, with tweets posted by intruders tricking people into sending $ 100,000 worth of Bitcoin, allegedly in exchange for double the amount sent.

Since then, multiple people between the ages of 17 and 22 have been charged in the hack, in which they targeted Twitter employees to obtain personal access codes to access the company’s internal systems.

In September 2019, Twitter experienced a brief but embarrassing attack: founder Jack Dorsey’s account was hacked and erratic and offensive messages were posted from it.