SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter feeds went down for hours on Tuesday in many part of the world in one of the worst outages in the 10-year history of the messaging platform.

The San Francisco group acknowledged in an online posting that some users were “experiencing problems accessing Twitter” but offered no details.A spokesperson for Twitter Europe confirmed the site was down, while users in South Africa, Brazil, the Philippines, Nigeria and Uganda also reported problems accessing the site with the hashtag #twitterdown on Facebook.

Users in affected countries were met with the message: “Something is technically wrong”. Some users managed to post to Twitter despite the outage — and #twitterdown was the top trending topic on the network.

“So #twitterdown was trending when Twitter was down?!” one astonished user tweeted.

Others made light of the outage, with one tweeting, “#twitterdown was the worst. I had to go on Facebook to make fun of the people on Facebook”.

Published in Dawn, January 20th, 2016