Twitter back up for many users after global outage

Twitter was coming back online on Thursday after an hour-long outage kept thousands of users across the globe from accessing the social media website.

The outage affected nearly 2,000 users as of 9 am ET, down from the peak of 50,000 incidents an hour earlier, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

The incident comes days after Twitter sued Tesla CEO Musk for violating his deal to buy the company and asked a Delaware court to order the world's richest person to complete the takeover.

"Some of you are having issues accessing Twitter and we're working to get it back up and running for everyone. Thanks for sticking with us," the social media company said in a tweet.

Twitter's status dashboard showed it was investigating the issue with some of its application programming interfaces.

Twitter is hosted on Amazon Web Services and began using Google Cloud Platform as the secondary vendor from 2018, according to Well Fargo Securities analyst Brian Fitzgerald.

"It doesn't seem to be a problem with its cloud vendors as other services continue to run," Fitzgerald told Reuters.

Twitter had suffered another widespread outage in February that it blamed on a software glitch.

Other big technology companies have also been hit by outages in the past year, with a near six-hour interruption keeping Meta Platforms' WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger out of the reach billions of users in October.

Notorious for outages in its early years, Twitter used its popular "Fail Whale" illustration, a beluga being lifted by birds, for such incidents until in 2013 when it discontinued the logo.

Twitter shares were marginally down at $36.51 on Thursday.