Good news: Twitter fell over. Bad news: It's working again

All-too-brief reminder of quieter times as overcapacity turns to full-on outage

Updated Microblogging platform Twitter fell over today, leaving billionaires bereft of playthings and users having to resort to other modes of communication for their conspiracy theories.

After warning that it was over capacity, the platform threw in the towel between 1300 and 1400 UTC before clambering unsteadily back to its feet.

The social network has been the subject of intense speculation over recent weeks and months as Elon Musk first sought to buy it before attempting to extract himself from the deal, citing concerns over bot accounts and API rate limits in his justification for withdrawal.

For its part, Twitter sued Musk earlier this week and claimed agreements to buy the business had been broken.

A look at Twitter's status shows a field of green ticks and all systems operational. In fact, the platform's API showed no incidents despite the site not functioning and the Downdetector website making it quite clear that all was not well today.

The Register asked Twitter what had befallen it. Its support voicebox has remained silent on the issue and we will update should the service respond.

In the meantime, the platform appears to have pulled itself together once again and the capacity warnings are no longer present. Its absence, however, is a reminder that there was once a world where such services did not exist. And, like today's outage, everyone headed to alternative forums in order to vent their collective spleen. ®

Updated at 15.41 UTC on 14 July 2022

Following publication of this article, Twitter thanked us for asking for comment and sent us this as a statement:

Some of you are having issues accessing Twitter and we're working to get it back up and running for everyone. Thanks for sticking with us.

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 14, 2022