Twitter Services Restored Following Global Outage Due to Change in Internal Systems

Twitter said on Thursday its social networking site was down for many users due to an inadvertent change it had made to its internal systems but the platform seemed to be returning to normal after about an hour and half of outage.

The company said that the site should be working for everyone within the next few hours and that it did not have any evidence of a security breach or a hack.

Outage tracking website Downdetector.com showed more than 55,000 users were facing issues with Twitter.

In July, Twitter reported a breach where hackers accessed its internal systems to hijack some of the platform's top voices, including US presidential candidate Joe Biden and reality TV star Kim Kardashian, and used them to solicit digital currency.

The mysterious tweets were marked by a similar message, asking people to donate Bitcoins, promising double returns. A post from Bill Gates' account read, “Everyone is asking me to give back. You send $1,000 (roughly Rs. 73,300), I send you back $2,000 (roughly Rs. 1,46,700).” A similar message was posted from several other prominent accounts as well, specifying that the double return offer would last for 30 minutes. All such tweets has since been removed.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered a probe following the hack of celebrity Twitter accounts. The alleged scam reportedly stole more than $1,18,000 (roughly Rs. 86,59,100) in Bitcoin. Florida prosecutors said Graham Ivan Clark was the mastermind behind the hack, and charged the 17-year-old Tampa resident as an adult with 30 felonies.

Clark has pleaded not guilty. Federal prosecutors charged two others with aiding the hack.

© Thomson Reuters 2020

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