Twitter was down – but the service has now almost fully recovered

As we mentioned above, issues with Twitter began in the early hours of the morning in the US and just as many in the UK were lunchtime scroll.

The outage tracker site DownDetector showed a massive spike in complaints, with users hitting up other social media sites to report problems.

If you've just logged onto Twitter, you'll have likely seen this message up. The social network appears to be experiencing a big outage, with reports on Downdetector continuing to show a big spike.

We're contacting Twitter to get official comment, but for now you'll have to head to TikTok and Reddit to snack of memes and hot-takes.

The big Twitter outage appears to be a pretty global problem, with spikes in reports of issues in most countries. In the US, there were 54,000 reports of problems on Downdetector in the last few minutes – a lot more than the last time this happened in March.

It's almost as big in the UK, though, with 27,000 reports there, reflecting the lunchtime frustration of those (including us) who just wanted to snack on the installment of the UK's latest political psychodrama. 

When there's a big internet outage like this, the first place we usually turn to is... Twitter. The social network hasn't responded to our requests for comment, but the issues seem to be easing in the UK at least.

Anecdotally, some members of the TechRadar team has found the site working again on desktop and mobile. But over in the US, there are still major issues – resulting in fun error messages like this. 

As Reddit has discussed, the biggest fear when you see massive Twitter error messages is that your account has been hacked or deleted. But fear not, the social network is simply experiencing its longest global outage for a while.

Naturally, there's a lot of chat that the outage is related to the seemingly-troubled Elon Musk takeover. While Twitter is down, we're very much open to conspiracy theories from elsewhere... 

We've just guffawed at a fine joke from @Dadsaysjoke, so that can only mean one thing – Twitter is seemingly back in action.

The Downdetector reports have dropped to just over 1,500 in the UK and our US Editor-in-chief has made this celebratory tweet. All is well in the world again.

Hey Twitter outage fans, John here subbing in for Mark so he can grab a bite to eat. However, it looks like my stint with you will be short lived as things appear to be getting back to normal.

Twitter has acknowledged the outage today, but its tweet feels like it's come a little late - where was this an hour ago, Twitter!?

If you're still with us, then let me firstly say, thank you. We appreciate you, your time and your thoughts.

Secondly, seeing as you love Twitter so much, there's been some rather interesting news about the social network in recent months. You can familiarize yourself with it all via the articles below.

July 14:
Twitter is improving its accessibility features – but there's more work to be done

July 8:
Elon Musk is 'terminating' the Twitter deal
Twitter wants to add pointless features while Elon Musk kills his deal to buy it
Twitter is removing over a million spam accounts every day

May 13:
Elon Musk: Twitter deal is on hold

May 3:
Twitter's Elon Musk marriage is packed with risks - according to Twitter

April 26:
Elon Musk to acquire Twitter for $44 billion

April 5:
Elon Musk now owns almost 10% of Twitter