Twitter says massive outage caused by 'inadvertent' systems change

Users complained of feeds not updating and the inability to send tweets.

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Steven Musil

Oct. 15, 2020 5:25 p.m. PT

Twitter is having some issues.

Angela Lang/CNET

Twitter appears to be returning to normal Thursday afternoon after an outage on the social network prevented users from being able to tweet, resulting in feeds not being updated with fresh posts. Twitter said earlier that it was working to resolve the issue and that it had no indication hackers were involved.

"We have no evidence of a security breach or hack, and we're currently investigating internal causes," Twitter said in a statement.

"The recent issue was caused by an inadvertent change we made to our internal systems," Twitter said in a tweet. "Twitter should be working for everyone within the next few hours."

However, while Twitter feeds began to repopulate with current posts, many users complained about still not being able to tweet.

The issue appears to have begun around 2:30 p.m. PT, affecting users in major cities across the US for about 90 minutes. Downdetector.com, which tracks whether a website is working properly, showed a spike in performance complaints related to Twitter.