Twitter’s down — making it difficult to complain about it being down (update: it’s back)

Social network Twitter has been down for the past 20 minutes or so for some users. The website isn’t loading, and TweetDeck isn’t populating new tweets.

The company has not yet issued an update about the incident on its status page on Tumblr.

But when I opened Facebook just now, I found someone complaining about Twitter being down at the very top of my News Feed. I can’t check Twitter because, you know, Twitter is down. There is not even a fail whale to see; Twitter retired the fail whale years ago. You just get a browser error.

Downrightnow.com currently shows that Twitter is having a “likely service disruption.” And Downforeveryoneorjustme.com says Twitter “looks down from here.”

Twitter also went down as part of an internet meltdown of sorts on October 21.

Update at 10:18 p.m. Pacific: When I refreshed TweetDeck on the web, I received the error message “Unable to connect. Please check your network.” But my connection is fine. So I went back to Facebook, and there was a brand new post at the top of my News Feed about Twitter being down.

Update at 10:20 p.m. Pacific: Twitter.com and TweetDeck are coming back for some people. Including me. But some parts of Twitter, like Twitter Analytics and dev.twitter.com, are slow to load. Meanwhile, Twitter has not provided a statement through its main accounts or its Tumblr page regarding the outage. Steve Ragan of CSO Online says the incident was caused by a BGP error.

Update at 10:43 p.m. Pacific: Downdetector.com indicates that some people are still having issues; officially the site says there are currently “problems at Twitter.”

Update at 11:09 p.m. Pacific: Twitter Analytics and dev.twitter.com are loading now, and there are fewer reports of issues on Downdetector.com. Twitter appears to be back for the most part.

Update at 11:18 p.m. Pacific: The website status.twitter.com confirms that Twitter was “intermittently unavailable for some users.” Twitter says that users may have had issues starting at 9:46 p.m. Pacific and that service was restored at 10:18 p.m. Pacific. “Engineers continue to investigate the root cause of this incident,” Twitter says.

Update on November 7: Mazdak Hashemi, who runs infrastructure and operations engineering at Twitter, says in a tweet that the cause of the downtime was a “network routing misconfiguration during internal testing.”