Oh no, Twitter too?

Oh no, Twitter too?

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Social media outages are the new blackouts and it seems like no one’s safe from them. Twitter (TWTR) might’ve been a bit cheeky when Monday’s Facebook (FB) outage struck but it looks like it got a little taste of its own medicine soon enough.

A few hours after the Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp outages, users started to report issues with the blue-bird app — 40% of users had problems on the platform, while 39% couldn’t access refreshed timelines. Facebook’s issues were reported to have occurred due to network problems, but Twitter’s support team labeled their outage a result of user overload. It’s a bit hard to vent about a social media outage when there are no social media sites up, which meant that Twitter (one of the few that was up) saw a large influx of active users, straining the site’s servers. It seems to have been a good thing though, as Twitter’s share price was up 2.4% yesterday.

Why it matters

For some, an outage might mean not getting to post that cat video but, especially in the developing world, social media sites are a huge economic driver. With 5 million businesses on WhatsApp, the outage shows how dependent the global economy is on these sites.

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