In the most aggressively Monday move of all time, it appears that the social media platform Twitter is down across several continents as of the morning of Dec. 12. All of us manically refreshing our browsers are probably wondering the same thing: why is Twitter down? The website Down Detector, which tracks internet outages globally, indicates that it is reporting outages across the eastern U.S. (aka, the part of the U.S. that is awake at 7 a.m. EST), Europe, and Japan. Bustle has reached out to ask Twitter what the cause for the outage is, and will update this post upon response.
The good news is that unlike times when Twitter has gone dark in the past, it does seem to be intermittently working for some users, providing us just enough time to whine about Twitter being down before it kicks us back off again. But while there is no absolute certainty for what is causing the outages quite yet, we can examine past reasons why Twitter went down to see if one of them might be a good fit. The most recent time Twitter went down on a global scale, for instance, was probably the most notable one:
A DDoS Attack
On Oct. 21, Twitter was one of many sites including Reddit and Spotify to go down after a "massive cyber attack" targeted Dyn, Inc, a large internet service provider. It took several hours to solve the DDoS attack, but systems eventually all came back online. Seeing as both Reddit and Spotify are also experiencing outages on Down Detector that correlate with Twitter's, a scenario like this may not be out of the question.
The Servers Are Overloaded
Sometimes, but very rarely in the case of a large platform like Twitter, the servers are overloaded from the influx of users, and the site goes down as a result. Seeing as the outages are being reported from regions that are just waking up and there hasn't been any massive global news that would incite so many users logging on, this is probably not the case we're looking at today.
We Literally Just Set It On Fire Tweeting About Politics
Honestly at this point 2016 just needs to sit in a corner and think about what it did.
This post is updating ...
