Twitter down: App and website break after being hit by bizarre bug

Twitter has broken after seemingly being hit by an unusual bug.

Some users were unable to log in or get online at all. But those who were could see something more strange: tweets displaying as if they were posted in 1970, and various posts refusing to load.

Tracking website Down Detector saw a huge surge in reports of problems on Tuesday afternoon UK time. Problems were seen right across the world.

The unusual date is seemingly a consequence of the so-called Unix epoch. Many computers do not count time in the usual way, but instead register it as the number of seconds that have amassed since 1 January 1970, which is called the Unix epoch.

That system is a helpful way for programmers to represent time within their code. But it also means that any problems with that code can lead to confusion, since they will often make it appear as if something happened 50 years ago.

Even users who could see those posts saw the tweets as empty or not showing properly, however, suggesting that the issue was more widespread than just a problem with the time.

Users also reported that retweets appeared to broken, showing instead as “RT” alongside the post they had tried to share. That was the way Twitter users re-shared posts before the functionality was built into Twitter – and to this day that system is still used in the code that underpins Twitter as it appears to users.

The problems come almost exactly a year after Elon Musk bought Twitter, a deal that was closed on 27 October, 2022. After that acquisition was completed and Mr Musk fired the majority of Twitter’s staff, some predicted that the site could stop working completely – it has stayed online for much of the time since, but has been hit by a number of outages and technical issues.