Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube All Appear to Suffer Outages at the Same Time

The internet was really broken by someone? That kind of looks like it. On Wednesday, users of several of the most popular websites, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, experienced significant problems, with many of them losing access to fundamental services and functionalities.

The initial reports came from users of Twitter, who said they received a notification stating they had used up their daily “Tweet limit” upon logging in. There is a tweet restriction on Twitter (it is 2,400 per day), which the site claims it utilizes to lessen the load on its server. The majority of individuals don’t tweet that often, however, and many of those who claimed to have received the message said they hadn’t even tweeted that day.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube all at the Same Time

A monitoring group called NetBlocks, which keeps tabs on global internet outages, verified on Wednesday that Twitter was dealing with “international outages” that were affecting a few of its functions. Twitter’s help website eventually released a brief message apologizing for the inconvenience in response to complaints: “Twitter may not be functioning as intended for some of you. Thanks for your patience. We’re aware of the issue and trying to address it.

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strangely enough, Facebook and Instagram seemed to be hit by a nearly similar ailment on Wednesday, with users saying that they were unable to publish new Instagram stories or use Facebook Chat. At about 4:30 p.m. EST, when Twitter also started experiencing issues, incident reports for both platforms increased significantly, according to Downdetector, a service that records individual complaints for online sites.

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To top it all off, some YouTube users reported Wednesday being unable to access the homepage of the service. Instead, a straightforward warning that said, “Something went wrong. Try one more, please. For the record, I had no issues logging onto YouTube, so the technical issue preventing some people from visiting the video hosting website isn’t impacting everyone. Finally responding to customer concerns, YouTube’s Twitter account said that they were “looking into” the issue and will follow up shortly.

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So what’s going on?

When people began to realize that the major websites on the internet were all experiencing problems at the same time, memes, hoaxes, and gags flooded Twitter. “Did Twitter pause because the last four Twitter workers testifying before Congress today? One individual exclaimed, “Coincidence?!?!?” in reference to the Congressional hearing on Wednesday involving Twitter executives. We have contacted the affected platforms for comment since we have no clue what occurred. If they reply, we’ll update this article.