Today, Twitter users experienced a three-hour outage that made them unable to access their accounts. The outage issues were mostly encountered by Android users in which they have been logged out and are not able to log back in.
The outage, which has got Twitter down for over three hours, seemed to have only impacted Android and Web users. According to Economic Times, several Android users got notifications that they have been logged out due an "authentication error" that also caused them to not able to log back in.
However, the microblogging site acknowledged the outage and posted a message online.
"Some users are currently having trouble signing in to Twitter," the microblogging site's message said. "Our engineers are currently working to resolve this."
Reports said that the three-hour outage was caused by a millennium bug-style date crisis. News.com.au reported that a server date change left many users locked out of their accounts while others noticed their tweets and posts to being dated back 365 days ago. The time stamp from the microblogging site's server showed the date on Monday as Dec. 29, 2015, 02:09:37 UTC.
As a repercussion of the time warp, Tech Times reported the outage prevented online and mobile users along with users for Android, Twitterific, Echofon and other third-party apps from logging in to the microblogging platform. While Apple devices seem to be the only ones not affected.
In the past years, Twitter has been known for its repeated unplanned outages, with the entire network frequently crashing either because too many users were tweeting about a certain subject or for reasons which were never revealed. But in more recent years, Stabley Times said the site's downtime has been rare and maintenance oftentimes take place in the middle of night, so as to go generally unobserved.
Because of the outage, several Twitter users have taken to Facebook to complain about the incident, suggesting that downtime on one social media site only means a provisional increase in traffic for the other networks.
Meanwhile Twitter, which currently has 284 million active monthly users, is back for most online and mobile users. In an updated status, the microblogging site explained what cause the outage.
"Between 4:00 and 9:25 PST today some users were unable to sign in to Twitter," the microblogging site stated. "This issue was due to a bug in our front end code, which has been patched. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this."
