With some of the world's most popular apps completely inaccessible, visitors from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp had overwhelmed Twitter on Monday night. According to Facebook, the global outage that lasted nearly six hours and caused millions of dollars worth of losses was caused by configuration changes on backbone routers. The situation has since been resolved.
But as netizens tweeted up a storm about the "global internet shutdown" and others resorted to memes, a somewhat strange trend was spotted. A subsection of people had taken to the microblogging platform tweeting about how Twitter itself was down. Others were convinced that it was only a matter of time before the hashtag came to fruition.
"Okay so TWITTER is also kinda down now? Failing to load replies!! #TwitterDown" read one post with an attached screenshot. Similar concerns were flagged by several others who found themselves unable to load replies or see private messages.
"Sometimes more people than usual use Twitter. We prepare for these moments, but today things didnโt go exactly as planned. Some of you may have had an issue seeing replies and DMs as a result. This has been fixed. Sorry about that!" read a tweet from Twitter support partway through the Facebook outage.
The "Twitter Down" hashtag gained additional momentum with many expressing hope that the platform would not follow in the footsteps of its social media brethren.
"Oh no Twitter please donโt go the same way as Facebook and WhatsApp. Trying to reply to a tweet and all I get is an error message, I donโt know if sent or not!! #TwitterDown I hope not!!" lamented another user.
"If Twitter goes down, I go down with it," vowed another.