Why Is Twitter Down?

On Monday afternoon, social networking giant Twitter unexpectedly went down. "Something is technically wrong," the site informed some users who tried to log in. "Thanks for noticing — we're going to fix it up and have things back to normal soon." The problem seemed to be particularly bad when people tried to access Twitter through its main desktop site. However, Twitter for mobile, TweetDeck, and Hootsuite continued to work as normal. "Current Status: Likely Service Disruption," the website Down Right Now reported.

(Update: As of 3:20 p.m. ET, Twitter is back online.)

It's not the first time Twitter has gone down, upsetting social media junkies around the globe. According to Mashable, Twitter had long outages in 2011 and in 2012. In October 2011, Twitter was down for more than an hour, but it was luckily at nighttime, when traffic isn't streaming in. A month later, it went down for another hour, from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. Then in June 2012, Twitter went down for another hour, after enjoying a relatively solid six-month period of staying online. And in its early stages, the site saw constant outages.

But this time, what with all the various ways users can access the platform, there were at least plenty of workarounds. Since the outage only affected the desktop website (and only for some users), the day mostly went on as normal.