Microblogging site hit by sporadic outages in many parts of globe

dimeji akinloye

January 19, 2016 7:17 PM

Intermittent breakdowns later spread to the United States and Canada in the early part of their working day.

A portrait of the Twitter logo in Ventura, California December 21, 2013. REUTERS/Eric Thayer

Twitter said on Tuesday its social network was suffering ongoing outages on computers and phones and it was working to resolve issues which have been widely reported across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and North America.

Both Twitter's web and mobile services began suffering outages concentrated in northern Europe around 0820 GMT, with smartphone users receiving the warning: "Tweets aren't loading right now."

Users from Scandinavia to Saudi Arabia to South Africa reported outages. India and Russia also suffered performance issues, according to a Twitter technical site.

Intermittent breakdowns later spread to the United States and Canada in the early part of their working day.

Sporadic disruptions continued at 1420 GMT, six hours after they first began to spread. At approximately 1745 GMT Twitter reported that some users were still having trouble accessing the service.

"We are aware of the issue and are working towards a resolution," a statement on the company's Twitter status website said (http://status.twitter.com/).

A company spokeswoman had no further comment.

Services had been restored for some affected users, only to fail again later. Some Twitter features continued to operate normally for some users, while others suffered disruptions, according to Twitter's developer website.

The on-again, off-again nature of the outages meant that the hashtag #twitterdown was trending as a topic while Twitter was down for many other users.

Twitter's shares were down more than 5 percent in midday trading.

dimeji akinloye