Twitter and TweetDeck experience partial outages worldwide, causing problems with login, images, polls, DMs, and more
Richard Lawler / Engadget : Tweets: @twittersupport and @twittersupport Tweets: @twittersupport : We've been experiencing outages across Twitter and TweetDeck. You might have had trouble Tweeting, getting notifications, or viewing DMs. We're currently working on a fix, and should be back to normal soon. @twittersupport : The issue is just about fixed. You should be able to access Twitter as usual. If not, give it a few more minutes! Thanks for waiting.
Context & Ripple Effects
This outage is one entry in a long reliability file for the platform: Twitter previously suffered a large web-and-mobile outage in January 2016, and the pattern continued into the current era with global timeline failures in early March 2023, an API-plan error that broke t.co links, images, and TweetDeck days later, and a desktop glitch randomly logging users out that spring.
What makes the 2019 incident notable is its breadth across product surfaces at once — login, images, polls, DMs, notifications — handled through @twittersupport status updates rather than a status page, which is how every subsequent episode in the coverage has played out too.
First-order effects
- Users worldwide lose access to core surfaces simultaneously — Tweeting, notifications, DMs, polls, image loading — with heavy users on TweetDeck hit hardest since it aggregates all of them in one client.
Second-order effects
- For advertisers, who per the related filings generated roughly $4B for Twitter in 2021 and $1.08B in Q2 2022 alone, each multi-surface outage raises the delivery-risk discount on a platform already competing for brand budgets.
Third-order effects
- If the cadence holds — 2016, 2019, then multiple episodes within weeks in 2023 — reliability itself becomes part of Twitter's competitive position, pushing power users toward multi-client setups like TweetDeck alternatives and making uptime a stated differentiator rather than an assumed baseline.
The trend: Across three ownership-era snapshots, Twitter's recurring multi-service outages are turning platform reliability from background plumbing into a visible competitive variable.