Twitter Went Down Because of an 'Internal Code Change'

Twitter was down for people all over the globe early Tuesday morning, and now we know what happened. Kinda.

It turns out that Twitter experienced an issue “related to an internal code change” that caused its Web and mobile apps to go down for a significant amount of time. In other words, someone wrote some bad code that crashed things for a while. It was an uncharacteristically long outage for Twitter, which first tweeted about it at 1:41 am PT, and didn’t confirm that everything was back up and running until more than eight hours later. Considering the real-time nature of the product, eight hours is a very long time.

https://twitter.com/Support/status/689510826466742272

The outage is yet another tough pill to swallow for Twitter investors. Yes, these kinds of outages happen from time to time with most major software companies. But Twitter is no longer most major software companies. It’s a company fighting to prove that its struggling stock price and user growth issues aren’t long-term concerns. It’s a company trying to prove that having a CEO busy running a separate company isn’t anything to worry about.

The stakes are incredibly high for Twitter right now as it approaches its Q4 earnings call early next month. Its stock is at an all-time low and a global outage, regardless of the reason, is not what the company needs.

https://twitter.com/CNBCnow/status/689524601148313600

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

We have a request

Vox's journalism is free because we believe that everyone deserves to understand the world that they live in. That kind of knowledge helps create better citizens, neighbors, friends, parents, consumers and stewards of this planet. In short, understanding benefits everyone. You can join in on this mission by making a financial gift to Vox today. Reader support helps keep our work free, for everyone. Will you join us?

One-Time Monthly Annual

$95/year

$120/year

$250/year

$350/year

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $120/year

Yes, I'll give $120/year

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via