Twitter appears to be back after outage

Twitter was down for about an hour Thursday in an outage that appeared to affect users around the world.

The company blamed "an internal configuration change." The outage began before noon PT; some users were able to access Twitter again by 12:45 p.m. Twitter said some users may be able to access the service as the company worked on a fix.

The disruption appeared to affect both web and mobile app users. According to Down Detector, a website that tracks outages, problems were reported from the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.

Outages were widespread in Twitter's early years, so much so that a cartoon "fail whale" the company would put up during outages came to symbolize Twitter almost as much as its little blue bird icon. The whale was retired in 2013, largely because Twitter didn't want to be associated with what it represented any more. After all, outages had become far less common.

This time, Twitter's home page read in part, "Something is technically wrong. Thanks for noticing."

The outage came as President Donald Trump convenes a White House conference of like-minded critics of Big Tech. Tech companies such as Twitter weren't invited.

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