Major social media sites including Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram all faced outages last night. Although changes to Twitter may have caused some problems unique to that site, they can’t explain the significant outages suffered by Facebook’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube.
Fortune reports that on Wednesday afternoon, several well-known social media sites went down, frustrating users. One of the impacted apps was Twitter, which reportedly had something to do with the new 4,000 character limit that had been implemented on the platform earlier in the day. Users encountered errors and were unable to publish tweets. Though the issue was eventually fixed, Twitter has not yet explained why it occurred and issues for many users continued into the night.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk hinted that the new feature for Twitter Blue subscribers, which allows them to tweet up to 4,000 characters, is probably related to the outage in an email to Twitter staff that was leaked. He also advised the staff to “pause for now on new feature development in favor of maximizing system stability and robustness, especially with the Super Bowl coming up.”
Another impacted app was Google’s YouTube, with over 50,000 issues noted by DownDetector. The error message “There was a problem with the server [429],” and an empty homepage were the main problems mentioned by users.
In a tweet, YouTube acknowledged the problem and stated that they were looking into the root of the outage. Video playback and other features of the website continued to work despite the homepage issue, though not all users were impacted.
Facebook and Instagram were also said to have experienced outages that were later fixed. Users of WhatsApp reported issues with server connections and message sending as a result of the issue. The cause of the outages remains unknown.
Read more at Fortune here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan