Twitter goes down, and it's probably for the best

Twitter finally struck a blow against doomscrolling.

Everyone's favorite time suck went down Thursday afternoon, preventing — at least at the time of this writing — its users both from tweeting and from reading about how the world is crumbling around them. According to Downdetector, which is owned by Mashable parent company Ziff Davis, reports of problems began trickling in around 2:12 PST.

Blinking twice for help. Credit: screenshot / twitter

We reached out to Twitter for comment, and a spokesperson confirmed that all is not right in Twitter Land.

"We know people are having trouble Tweeting and using Twitter," wrote the spokesperson. "We're working to fix this issue as quickly as possible."

At the time of this writing, the Twitter status page showed this as an "Active Incident."

Also, perhaps in an attempt to ease worried users thinking back to the massive July hack, the status page also noted that Twitter doesn't believe hackers are behind Thursday's problems.

"We have no evidence this outage is caused by a security breach or hack," noted the status page. "We’re currently investigating internal root causes and will share more soon."

Oops. Credit: screenshot / twitter

So enjoy your freedom from the never-ending onslaught of bad news while it lasts because it certainly won't last long.

UPDATE: Oct. 15, 2020, 3:26 p.m. PDT: This story was updated with a comment from a Twitter spokesperson, and the "Active Incident" label from the Twitter status page.

UPDATE: Oct. 15, 2020, 3:54 p.m. PDT: This story was updated with additional information from the Twitter status page.

UPDATE: Oct. 15, 2020, 4:19 p.m. PDT: Twitter restored the ability of some, but not all, of its users to tweet. And, in a (tweeted) statement, reassured everyone again that it doesn't believe hackers are involved in today's outage.

"Twitter has been down for many of you and we're working to get it back up and running for everyone," read the statement. "We had some trouble with our internal systems and don't have any evidence of a security breach or hack."

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

UPDATE: Oct. 15, 2020, 5:11 p.m. PDT: Twitter said it identified the cause of Thursday's outage, and should be able to resolve the issue by the end of the day.

"The recent issue was caused by an inadvertent change we made to our internal systems," read a statement on the Twitter status page. "Twitter should be working for everyone within the next few hours."