It’s not you, it’s the bird. Twitter users reported outages on the Twitter iOS app Wednesday, but using the social media site on a desktop seemed to be doing just fine.
According to DownDetector, reports of Twitter outages began pouring in shortly after 2 p.m. EST. At 2:45 p.m., 9,499 outages were reported. Staffers here at Gizmodo also confirmed that they were having issues with the mobile app. Outages started to flatten out shortly after 3 p.m. 86% of the reports involved the Twitter app, while only 8% describe issues with the desktop website. As of publishing this article, the Twitter app appears to be up and running again.
We’d like more information about what caused these outages and reached out to Twitter to clarify. The Elon Musk-owned site did not immediately return Gizmodo’s request for comment on the outages, or the cause of them. It’s safe to say that’s because the company no longer has much of a communications department since Musk took over.
Welp, I just accidentally took down Twitter. You can blame @elonmusk if you like though. 🫠
— Leah Culver (@leahculver) February 15, 2023
In the fallout of Twitter’s iOS meltdown, senior software engineer Leah Culver took the blame with a Tweet. According to Culver, Twitter went belly-up after she was tinkering with Twitter’s Spaces feature. “I turned on a Spaces feature that did not perform well at scale. Luckily the Site Stability team was on it right away and we rolled it back. Apologies!” she tweeted this afternoon, following the outages.
Update February 15 4:13 p.m. EST: This article was updated with a quote from Leah Culver, who took responsibility for the outages on Twitter.