Twitter Crashed For Users Worldwide Early Tuesday

Are your tweets not sending quite right? You're not alone. Twitter was down in several European countries, The Guardian reported Tuesday morning. Some other news organizations — the AFP among them — reported the news (somewhat ironically, via Twitter). The problem was confirmed by Twitter's status page (luckily powered by Tumblr), which said the San Francisco company is working toward a resolution.

According to The Guardian, the service started to falter at 3:20 a.m. ET. Tweets didn't send via the social media platform's website, mobile app, or API (the application programming interface which allows other programs, like Tweet Deck, to send messages over the service). The service was largely back up and running by about 5 a.m. ET, although some features like advanced search remained unavailable to some users and resulted in error messages.

In addition to their Tumblr post, Twitter sent out a tweet acknowledging the service issues — although many were unable even to see it during the outage. It read, "Some users are currently experiencing problems accessing Twitter. We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution.” Those who were able to see it liked and retweeted with abandon.

Reuters reported that the outage was concentrated in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Screenshots of the outage map from Down Detector taken by RT showed some problems being reported on the East Coast of the United States as well. Later in the morning, Twitter in Japan also appeared to be having problems.

Twitter has had largely reliable service in recent years. It retired its "Fail Whale" — the illustration of a whale being raised out of the water by birds which served as the company's first outage page design — in 2013, after working to reduce outages.

As the service came back online, users returned to tweeting. The hashtag #twitterdown had been trending on Facebook. Users were quick to make jokes and profit from the technical difficulties. One UK charity hoped to use the outage as a way to help the homeless. Shelter, a housing and homelessness charity, tweeted, "Whilst Twitter was down, eight families in Britain will have been made homeless," with a link to donate.

May your tweets post correctly — and if not, find your own way to make the most of it. I hear Snapchat's cool.