Updated: Twitter is back to normal after an hour of slow loading

Photo from Quka/Shutterstock

Update: Around 6:25 pm PT Twitter’s loading speed returned to normal. Twitter released a statement confirming that the issue lasted an hour and 39 minutes. It apologized but didn’t explain what caused the delay.

 

During the first night of CES, Twitter seems to have lost the will to live. Can you blame it?

In a highly scientific survey of Gigaom editorial staff, all of our Twitter streams weren’t loading new tweets starting around 5 pm PT, including people on different Wi-Fi. At the time of publishing, we could only load tweets that were published 22 minutes ago or more (the lag has since increased to almost an hour).

This went for those using Twitter.com as well as those using the Twitter desktop app and Tweetdeck. However, when I sent a direct message to my editor, he received it immediately. The issue didn’t appear to be location based, as both East Coast and West Coast team members were having problems loading tweets on Twitter.

Around 6:00 pm PT Twitter’s website went down entirely and the friendly fail robot made an appearance. Haven’t seen him in awhile. A few minutes later it was back up, but there was still a 53 minute delay in tweets appearing.

Twitter’s status page showed no update when we initially published this story, but has since released a statement saying, “We are currently experience an issue with tweeting and a delay in timelines. Our engineers are currently working on this issue.” It took Twitter roughly 50 minutes to publish this explanation from the point Gigaom staff first noticed the tweet loading delay.

At time of initial publishing, Downrightnow.com showed Twitter as being down with the following chart inspired by the 90’s.

Down Right Now's chart of Twitter's service on January 5th at 5:20 pm PT

Down Right Now’s chart of Twitter’s service on January 5th at 5:20 pm PT

Downdetector.com also showed the site as having some problems in the last hour, with 485 crowdsourced reports sent to the site around the 5 pm pt mark.

Down Detector's crowd sourced graph of Twitter problems on January 5th, 2015 at 5:29 pm PT

Down Detector’s crowd sourced graph of Twitter problems on January 5th, 2015 at 5:29 pm PT

We’ve reached out to Twitter for confirmation and explanation of what’s going on and will update this as the story develops.

 

This story has been updated with Twitter’s statement and additional information since its first publishing.

 

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