Having issues using Twitter? Social site back after brief outage

SAN FRANCISCO — Twitter appears to be back after a nearly hour-long outage.

The company said Thursday that it was investigating the problem but had did not say how widespread the outage was.

It began before noon. The disruption appeared to have affected both web and mobile app users. According to Down Detector, a website that tracks outages, problems are being reported from the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.

Outages were widespread in Twitter’s early years, so much so that a cartoon “fail whale” the company would put up during outages came to symbolize Twitter almost as much as its little blue bird icon. The whale was retired in 2013, largely because Twitter didn’t want to be associated with what it represented any more. After all, outages had become far less common.

The outage occurred as President Donald Trump convenes a White House conference of like-minded critics of Big Tech.

Screengrab via status.twitterstat.us/