Twitter experienced another significant downtime this year. The outage may have something to do with the upcoming elections.
Earlier today, the social media platform encountered problems causing most of its users unable to tweet for a couple of hours.
Most of you should be back to Tweeting. The outage was caused by a system change initiated earlier then planned, affecting most of our servers. We’re working hard to bring Twitter back to normal and expect things to be fully resolved in 1-2 hours. We appreciate your patience.
— Support (@Support) October 16, 2020
However, in their recent update, it seems that their systems are back to normal, and they said that they would resolve the issue in a couple of hours. This isn’t the first time that Twitter experienced this kind of problem.
They also faced a security breach involving cryptocurrency back in July, where a group of hackers was able to access accounts of well-known personalities such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk.
Irregularities with Twitter APIs
Investigating the issue e further, we observe that the leading cause of the downtime was because of their API.
As of this writing, they have restored most of their systems particularly their v2 endpoints which they claimed to have fully recovered.
However, they are still investigating their Historical PowerTrack, Enterprise Search, Replay API, Compliance Firehose, Standard v1.1 sample, and filtered streams as posted on their Twitter API status page.
Presidential election sabotage?
Other sources such as CNBC and The Guardian observed that the outage happened after Facebook and Twitter flagged down a controversial news story about U.S. presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Last October 14, a news story from The New York Post popped out this week about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, exchanging emails with a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm.
Later on, the two social media giants had an editorial decision to limit the distribution of the said article as it had the potential to be fake news.
Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Facebook, tweeted that the story is going to be fact-checked by their partners.
While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 14, 2020
Featured image courtesy of Photo Mix/Pixabay